


What the Ghost Wants

by justanotherStonyfan



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Background Relationships, Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Clint Barton Is a Good Bro, Creepy, F/M, Ghosts, Halloween, M/M, Mild Gore, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Nightmares, References to Depression, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-25 22:08:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12542276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotherStonyfan/pseuds/justanotherStonyfan
Summary: The man Steve rescued from the Hydra facility is still Bucky, but he's changed. Steve isn't overly surprised - they all have, and it's still his Bucky. As for Bucky, that kid from Brooklyn who was too stupid to run away from a fight? Turns out all bucky ever wanted to do was follow him. Always.





	1. The 20th Century

**Author's Note:**

> **Happy Halloween 2017!**
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> I say very loosely that this is Canon-Compliant - you'll have to give me some suspension of disbelief. Background Relationships means the relationships are background. Also, some of what I wanted from this fic relies on weird formatting. You have been waaarned.
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> Also! AyaroS92 has made beautiful fanart which should be linked at the end of this. Please go and give them some love for their amazing work!

**Italy, 1943.**

It had begun to rain again by the time Steve next saw Bucky. Steve didn't know what Peg must've said to Phillips, but he'd allowed Bucky a separate tent. Probably given that Buck'd been through so much. He wasn't the only one back to camp, but he was the only one back from the wing Steve had found him on.

Strapped to cold metal, blearily repeating his identification information, it was a picture Steve was never going to forget, that was for damned sure. And one of the fellas Steve'd brought back, a guy with a mustache and an attitude,Tim, the guy said his name was, talked to him about it while Bucky'd been checking on one of the guys riding on the tank. Steve made the mistake of asking him how many men they took, how often. Tim just shrugged and said they came for the next one whenever the last one gave out.

The guy from Fresno, Morita - Morita said something about it shoulda been him really but Buck stepped in, pissed 'em off as a distraction – God, of course he did – and the men in the goggles, the Hydra soldiers, they were all too happy to take an all-white American instead. 

Steve didn't know who to thank that he'd reached Bucky in time, only that he was glad he had, glad he'd got the time to get him back to camp, glad Bucky was alive to be taken care of and given a separate tent. 

Except when he went in, into Bucky's tent that is, after he'd given a full report to Phillips (it took time, time Steve wanted to spend with Bucky, but Steve owed him after his lenience,) it was near enough to dark anyhow. Bucky was sitting on the edge of his cot like he used to sit on the edge of his bed sometimes, head down, swaying just a little back and forth like he was drunk or something. He only had a small lamp in the corner, most of the tent in darkness.

“Bucky?” Steve said to him, and Bucky shifted a little, startled hard, and then leaned away.

“Jesus, Stevie,” he rasped, his voice still rough, and he passed his hand over his eyes. “Warn a guy, wouldja?” 

“Sorry,” Steve said, edging forward. “Sorry, Buck.”

It was still strange then to be finally seeing the top of peoples' heads when he stood up straight, of cutting the kind of figure guys needing warning about, and it was still difficult to know if he was walking quiet when he meant to. Didn't matter marching around battlefields and munitions factories, didn't matter when you were...well, when you were being Captain America. 

But how's about trying not to scare your best friend half to death, though, that's the ticket.

“Are you-” stupid question, how far could a man get from 'all right?' “How, how you feelin'?” 

Bucky shook his head slowly, uncoordinated.

“Can you shut that flap, Stevie?” he said, holding up a hand to block the light.

Steve was offended for a second until he realized Bucky meant the tent.

“Oh!” he said, and then he got the fabric flap back down. “I-I just...” and then what? 

He didn't have a clue about it, not a damn clue. How d'you find something to say to someone at a time like this? Nobody else had even _had_ a time like this. Bucky'd been damned close to a letter home, for certain this time, and Steve had been gee'd up to be bigger than a damned elephant, and who in their right mind could've guessed it?

“I...was...I mean, I can go if you want quiet.”

Bucky looked at him, still kind of squinting even in the dark. 

“You wanna go?” he asked, and Steve shook his head, heaved a sigh.

“Buck, I didn't come all the way to getcha just to leave ya now.”

Bucky seemed to soften a little, his posture not so good, his eyes not so open.

“Thank Christ.” he muttered, and then, a little louder when he spoke again. “This really you, huh? Not some mook who looks like my buddy, not some kinda...not some dream kinda thing, no?” 

He looked wary, all kinds of tired and a good helping of sad just to top it off, like he figured the whole damn setup was a trick or something, like he was starting to doubt he'd ever been rescued at all. Steve walked over to him, knelt on the ground to get eye to eye with him, and wasn't that something.

“It's still me,” he said, “it's still me, Bucky, I swear it, my hand to God.”

Bucky shook his head, searched Steve's face with his eyes while the rest of him went real still.

“I dunno,” he said, so quiet it was almost to himself, and Steve felt a little sick, a little cold. “I can see all your face up in there but it's...I mean, it's gotta be you, don't it? They couldn't'a found out about you, I didn't tell 'em nothin'.”

“Buck,” Steve said, taking Bucky's hands in both his own, and he'd always looked like he had shovels for arms, little skinny arms and huge, long hands, but now his hands could hold Bucky's proper. “I swear to you, Buck, it's really me. It's really me, you know it is, ain't nobody stupid enough to come get you but me, right?”

Bucky started moving again, seemed to breathe where he'd seemed not to before, looked away as though he'd found Steve a little too worrying to look away until then.

“Yeah,” he said, corner of his mouth twitching up, though Steve wasn't fooled by it. “Yeah, you're right. You're right, I...”

He trailed off, and Steve cocked his head, waited.

“Thought I saw you,” Bucky said eventually, quiet like, ashamed, not looking at Steve. “Thought you was there with me, you was standin' in the corner or...somethin', I don't know. I couldn't turn my head and look but you was there, I could hear you. And...first I thought, if you was there, that meant I was fixing to die. You know? Thought maybe God sent something to get me he'd know I wanted to see. But then I heard you, you you said it...it ain't fair. It ain't fair how you come all this way just to see me and I ain't there no more, and I thought if...” and he lifted his head, searched Steve's face again. “I thought if that's my Stevie and he comes all this way like a damn fool then I...I damn well better be here or that ticker'a his'll straight out quit. But I...I guess we don't gotta worry 'bout that no more, huh?”

“Hey,” Steve said, letting go of one of Bucky's hands to set his palm against Bucky's neck – didn't know if it was dirt or grime there but he figured he could be sure enough. “Where you're concerned, my ticker's always gonna have issues. I don't got a clue what to say to you, Buck, 'sides I'm glad you're here. I'm so...I'm so glad you ain't...”

And damn but it was hard to say. Steve couldn't get the words out, couldn't even say it. Didn't even want to anyhow.

“Yeah,” Bucky rasped. “Me too.”

Steve nodded at him, waited a couple seconds.

“Listen,” he said, digging under his collar, “I might just be a showgirl but I'm enlisted, and they gave me these.” He pulled his tags from his collar, thumb in the chain to hold them up to Bucky. “I hear they gimme two of 'em just in case one needs sendin' home.”

Bucky blinked at him.

“Well I ain't got nobody at home, do I?” Steve went on, and he set about finding the end of the chain.

“Stevie,” Bucky said, but Steve shook his head.

“I ain't got nobody at home,” he said. “I got no ma or pa, ain't got a girl. Only one person needs to know an' that's you, ain't it?”

Bucky chewed his lip a minute and then nodded, setting about finding the end of his own chain.

“Sure,” he said but then, as Steve held out of one his own tags, Bucky held one out in return. 

“Bucky...”

“Look, you gotta have two on ya, else you'll get pulled up on it. Phillips sees you missin' one and he'll pitch a fit. Right?” 

Steve stared at the tag, and then at Bucky. It wasn't the same for Buck as it was for him – Buck had a mom and a pop and a couple little sisters back home waiting on news about him. But maybe it meant to Bucky the same thing it meant to Steve. So Steve took it, real careful like a gift, just in case it was one. And then he slid it on his chain while Bucky took Steve's to slide onto his.

Then they tucked their tags back down their shirts and stared at each other a couple seconds more.

It was Steve moved first.

“Gettin' late,” he said, getting to his feet, “and you gotta rest, startin' now.”

“Oho, it's your turn now, Mother?” Bucky answered, but he started to sort himself out to sleep. “This is a neat little switch-up, huh?”

“Sure, Buck,” Steve said. “Neat's the word I'd choose. You need water or something, take a trip to the latrines?”

“Stevie,” Bucky said, lying down on his cot, his voice muffled, “I'm already asleep.”

Steve stared at him, at the length of his back and the way his body moved as he breathed. He wasn't relaxed enough to sleep, that was for sure, and Steve wasn't about to say a thing about it besides what needed to be said.

“You want somebody to keep watch?” he said, and Bucky's head turned just a little, so Steve could see the curve of his cheekbone as he looked back.

“If it'll make you feel better,” Bucky said, and then he yawned. 

“Yeah,” Steve said, hearing exactly what he was meant to hear as he settled into a chair. “Set my mind at ease. Might keep your lamp on, too, for readin'. That okay with you?”

“Up to you, Pal,” he said softly.

The next time he spoke, Steve had been sure he was asleep, and it was only just loud enough that Steve could hear it.

And it hurt somewhere deep in Steve's chest the way Bucky's voice sounded – thin and wavering – a truth he couldn't hide, when he said, “thanks, Stevie.”

Steve had had cause to say his own thanks so many times that he knew exactly how to parrot Bucky's usual answer back at him.

“Eh,” he said. “I was in the area anyhow.”

Bucky snorted and, little by little, his breathing eased into the rhythm of sleep. 

~

Steve woke early – real early – to darkness, because the lamp had burned out. Waking early was what he got, he guessed, for going to bed with the sun. _And with Bucky,_ his mind supplied and, oh yeah, way to keep watch, Rogers. He didn't know when he'd gone under but then, it didn't really matter. They were back at camp, safe - it was less about keeping watch and more about sharing space. He blinked a couple times while his eyes adjusted, as his body figured out what had woken him. And he had to look again at what he thought he saw but, no, he was pretty sure.

Ahead of him, Bucky was standing in the corner of the tent nearest the door, actually facing the corner, in the almost total darkness.

Steve looked at him for a few more seconds, mildly surprised and trying to figure out why on Earth he'd be where he was instead of in bed, and trying to make doubly certain his eyes weren't playing tricks. But it was definitely Bucky – Steve had been hanging around Bucky Barnes most of his life, he wasn't about to make any mistakes about him, not even in the dark. He knew the shape of Bucky's shoulders, knew the taper of the hair on the back of Bucky's neck, knew how Bucky Barnes carried himself.

So what the hell was Bucky doing standing in the corner like a naughty schoolkid in the middle of the night when he oughta be resting?

“Bucky?” Steve said, and his throat was a little dry. 

Bucky didn't answer, didn't turn around. He just stood still, his back to Steve, in the corner of the tent. 

Steve got to his feet.

“Come on, Buck, it's too cold to be up and about at this hour. Ain't even light yet.”

Bucky didn't answer, didn't turn, didn't move, still and silent. Steve stared at the back of his head – or, at least, as much that was visible inside the tent in the middle of the night without a lamp. And he was just about to step forward, to reach out and check that Bucky was doing okay, when Bucky moved, seemed to come entirely to life all at once, and slipped out of the tent without a sound.

Steve watched him go, surprised into inaction, and then followed after him a second later, stepping out into fresh, cold air and pale light.

Bucky wasn't there. 

Steve looked around for him in the stillness of a sleeping camp. He could see a couple sentries down by the edge of the firelight, knew there were a couple guys on patrol, but Bucky wasn't standing outside, like Steve had thought he might be. Didn't seem to be close, either. He must either have moved at a hell of a lick or gone down past the tents and in between. 

Steve figured that made sense, if Bucky hadn't just decided on an evening stroll - he glanced over in the direction of the latrines and, sure enough, he caught movement in that direction. Lucky the moon was out tonight or he'd never have seen it, even with his eyes.

He set off, expecting any second to see Bucky ahead of him around a tent corner or slipping between jeeps, but he couldn't catch up. Bucky was moving fast – had spent a lot more time in the camp than Steve had already anyways, and knew shortcuts between tents, likely as not. Steve'd catch him eventually, sure, but he wanted to make sure Bucky was all right, wanted to make sure Bucky didn't need help or nothing. But he couldn't reach him so he settled for following, not wanting to sing out, either, not in a camp full of sleeping soldiers. Wouldn't be fair on anyone, and Phillips would kill him.

He moved between tents and around crates, past vehicles and more tents and, eventually, Steve reached the latrines, stepping out from between a couple supply tents onto the damp dirt track and hoping he wasn't interrupting anything.

Bucky wasn't there.

Steve cocked his head to listen. Bucky could have been going anywhere – maybe just for a walk, even – or he might just have been done by the time Steve got there. He'd been a fair way ahead of Steve the whole time, after all. Besides, just 'cause Steve had expected him to visit the latrines didn't mean that's what Bucky'd been doing. And Steve had rushed to get where he _thought_ Bucky was headed instead of following him right. Steve's mother always said patience was a virtue he'd yet to learn, he supposed.

He turned around to backtrack and got as far as the jeeps when...he didn't rightly know. Later, he figured Bucky must've stepped on a twig or something and that got his attention, but whatever made him turn, Bucky was there when he did.

Sure, he was standing rigid about thirty feet away, and facing in the other direction, but Steve could at least see him again.

“Buck!” he whisper-shouted, and Bucky started off again. “Aw, come on.”

Steve followed the flashes he kept catching of Bucky moving between the tents, jogging a little to reach him, not sure if he was going around in circles or if it just felt like that, until he finally came out into the middle of camp to see Bucky ducking back into his own tent again.

Steve rolled his eyes and followed, trying not to slip on the loose stones and making a hell of a lot more crunching noise on the ground than Bucky had – probably his sniper skills – before he reached Bucky's tent and pulled back the flap to go inside. 

“Buck,” he said as he did. 

Bucky, the palooka, had got back into bed already.

“Huh?” he said, voice a little thick. 

Steve closed the tent flap behind him.

“I saw you just now, you mug. What the hell you doin' wanderin' about when you oughta be in bed?”

“Me? Nah,” Bucky said, and Steve just cocked an eyebrow at Bucky's spine as he took his seat again.

“Yeah, and I'm the Queen of Sheba,” Steve answered. “You stayin' asleep this time?”

“Mmm,” Bucky answered, snoring not two breaths after.

Steve just shook his head and settled in again.

***

**England, 1943**

“I ain't,” Bucky said. “And you can blather on about it if you want but I said what I said. 'S already done anyhow, ain't no use.”

And that was the problem right there – didn't matter what Steve said. Bucky'd already gone ahead and done it – signed himself up to march straight back into the thick of it just because he'd be following Steve. And not that Steve wouldn't be glad to have him alongside – that's all he'd really need for the rest of his life, was for Bucky to be alongside him – but Bucky'd been through so much, his injuries still not healed all the way. 

And Steve was no fool – they'd both changed. Steve had never killed a man until Austria, and he'd done it primarily for Bucky Barnes, that was a hell of a feeling, especially knowing he ought really have done it for his country. But here he was, here they both were, not boys any longer. 

Bucky's whole self seemed different – harder, leaner, a little less solid than it had been once, and it wasn't just his body. His smile was subdued, his eyes dark, and there was something sharp about him, something wild, like a cornered animal. He did his best not to show it to Steve but Steve had always been able to get a better read on Bucky than he could on anyone else. 

Bucky smiled like every joke was an irony and drank like he couldn't feel the drink, and he held himself like he was waiting for the next shell to fall. Steve didn't know what that was like, not yet, but he knew what blood felt like on his hands, what the kick of a handgun felt like, the crack-crunch of breaking bone, and the dead weight of a man going limp in his arms. 

First guy he'd punched full on, with all his strength 'cause he'd been caught off guard, straight-up didn't have a face when he keeled over backwards. Steve wasn't ever going to forget that, the way a human face looked when it oughta look like a face but didn't.

“What's it matter then, Buck?” Steve asked him. “If you've already said it, if you've gone and done it already, why shouldn't I tell you?”

Bucky seemed so tired in that moment, when he turned to look at Steve, looked so sad and so hopeless about it.

“You can say what you want,” Bucky said, “ _Pal._ It just ain't gonna get you nowhere.”

And Steve looked at him, really looked at him. 

“You remember what you said to me night before you shipped out?” Steve asked him, and Bucky turned around midway through buttoning his jacket, frowning.

“ 'Do you want a pack of peanuts before we meet-' ”

Steve threw a pillow at him, which clipped him on the shoulder, and Bucky gave him some semblance of his old smile.

“That bit about the most eligible bachelor,” Steve answered. “Only thing the ladies love more'n a man in uniform's a war hero. You could be living it up right now, as many laps of luxury as you choose.”

Bucky's eyes had darkened, his smile fading.

“I ain't no hero-”

“First of all, bull _shit_ you ain't,” Steve said, “but second, don't you want outta this? You could'a gone home, found yourself a dame-”

“You fuckin' boob, you get all doped up, fuckin' hoof your way into a USO show in the middle a' Europe, take your ass AWOL and drop yourself into _Austria_ to come get us and _you're_ askin' _me_ why I don't go home!?”

And if it had started out good-natured, Steve wasn't sure it was good natured now. Worse, he was hearing an implication he didn't like one bit.

“Bucky,” he said softly, “you don't owe me nothin'. I can talk to Phillips for you if you wanna-”

“Steve,” Bucky answered, softly too, his head on one said, almost sad. “You horse's ass. Shared mentality, a'right? Ain't nothin' you wouldn't do for me that I wouldn't do for you. What'd I tell you in Austria, huh?”

Steve felt his mouth twist.

“Not without you,” he said. “Bucky, I don't want you followin' me into this 'cause you think I need savin'-”

“Steve, you're here. You ain't back in Brooklyn or I'd've been on the first transport out. Now can we drop this and go get a damned drink?”

Steve nodded – Bucky'd made up his mind and that was all there was to it. 

“And you're always gonna need my backup, don't matter how big you get,” Bucky said as Steve shut the door to their room behind him before they went down to the bar. 

Steve shoved him and Bucky just snorted.

~

“Ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?” Steve said.

“Hell, no,” Bucky answered without even looking at him, but that was just fine.

Steve knew what he was gonna say next before he even said it.

***

**France, 1943**

“Are you outta your goddamn mind,” Bucky said, but Steve couldn't answer him. 

He tried but it wasn't no use. Bucky's voice didn't stay and Steve missed it when it wasn't there but there was dark and then light, a couple other voices and everything was...it was wrong, all of it.

Bucky was there and then he wasn't, and then there was no more light.

~

“Yeah, I saw. Think he's comin' around?”

“Bucky?” Steve tried to say, but it didn't sound like a word and it tasted like copper and old river water and it...

Damn, it _hurt_ -

“Buh...” he managed, and then it felt like somebody grabbed him around the chest and squeezed, felt like someone stabbed him with a pitchfork and everything went dark again.

~

Steve's eyes opened slow, and it felt like his eyelids were made of sandpaper. He breathed shallow, immediately aware of how breathing had felt the last time he remembered trying it. 

The room was pale, small, felt old – like a cottage or a...Steve didn't know, but it sure wasn't hospital bed he was lying in.

There were people in, though, in the room with him. One or two he didn't know, and two that he did. 

“Bucky,” he said, and it sounded like he was gargling gravel but it made everybody stop and look at him.

“Jesus Christ, you punk,” Bucky said, and then Bucky was right there in front of him, a little bruised, very unshaven – 

“You ain't shaved,” Steve mumbled, “you'll catch hell from Phillips.”

“Oh really, Steve, do shut up,” Peggy said, but she didn't sound like she meant it. 

She sounded like she meant something else but Steve couldn't get through his fog to figure out what.

“Why'm I hurtin'?” he asked, and Bucky's shocked expression turned furious.

“'Cause you took a bullet to the chest you goddamned idiot, what were you thinkin', you-“

“Weren't for me,” Steve said, 'cause it weren't, they hadn't even been aiming for him. “Weren't for me, they wanted you, an' I don't want for you to die, Buck, who'd I eat dinner with on Christmas?” 

Peggy made a little noise that might've been a word but it might not.

“But you didn't get shot, Bucky, you're okay. Why you mad for being just fine?”

“I'm mad,” Bucky said, his voice real low, “'cause _you_ got shot, all right? I'm mad 'cause some idiot wearing a flag decided jumpin' up an' down in the middle of the forest yellin' 'hello, Hydra, here I am,' is a good form of self-defense.”

“I didn't yell that,” Steve said, but then he didn't remember much of anything so maybe he had. “Did I?” 

Bucky's mouth dropped open and then he threw up his hands and turned on his heel.

“You gotta be fuckin' kidding me!” he said, and then Bucky went away again.

“Why'd he go?” Steve said. “Where'd he go, what's he gone for?”

Peggy pursed her lips and shook her head.

“If you don't understand it at the moment, Captain,” she said, “I'm afraid there probably isn't much I can do at this point to enlighten you.”

“Well that's a lotta words,” Steve answered, and immediately wished he hadn't. “No, I mean long ones, words, there's words and they was long and I don't think I get it, Ma'am.”

Always be honest with an officer. 

Agent. 

Did that count? 

“I imagine you will after a bit more rest,” she said. “We'll leave you to it. Try and get some sleep.”

And that was fine, Steve figured, he could follow that order. Did pretty good actually – he was already starting to do it before she told him.

~

It was night when Steve came to again, and he knew where he was this time, knew what was going on. More of what had happened came back to him as he thought about it and...yeah, all right, he'd got in the way, he'd stood up and taken a bullet and so what, huh? Steve had the kind of body that could take that, and Bucky had the kind of body that was good at taking long-distance shots without a single failure. Steve didn't try and tell Bucky how to set up a shot, and Bucky oughta be goddamn grateful instead of tellin' Steve how to do his job.

Steve almost laughed. That whole thought, start to finish, was a complete lie. 

Steve knew that Bucky must have been just as terrified to see him shot as Steve had been to see the shooter. Steve hadn't even had time to sing out because, if he had, Bucky might have tried to duck instead of dodge, might have tried to run instead of move. He might have moved the wrong way, looked in the wrong direction, done the wrong thing and Steve didn't doubt that Bucky's black eye probably came from Steve tackling him, but it had worked, though. He'd done it. He'd made sure Bucky didn't take that bullet.

And Bucky had every right to be furious with him. Bucky didn't get that kinda mad all too often but Steve could understand it, didn't begrudge him it. Steve had felt that way once or twice – they'd had a go in one of Schmidt's bases; Bucky took a knife in the thigh and there'd been so much blood Bucky'd started talking about his mother and asking Steve not to go and telling him half-formed things about when they were kids. 

Steve had been so honest-to-God terrified that he'd thrown up when they got back to camp, even though Bucky's survival back to camp basically meant he'd be fine no matter what – barring infection, of course, but they were a six-man team with one supersoldier. That meant an extra man's worth of med-kit that they could put to good use. (And if nobody at HQ mentioned that particular loophole to the higher-ups, it was only because HQ understood the kinds of missions Steve and the boys went on.)

So Steve knew helpless terror turned into incandescent rage, and had felt exactly the same in Bucky's position.

He couldn't fault Bucky, would even say Bucky had a right to yell at him, had a right to demand to know what the hell Steve thought he'd been doing, but he'd managed exactly what he'd set out to do and couldn't find it in himself to regret. 

He was sorry, sure. He didn't want Bucky to be sad or upset or any of those things, but regretful? Not a chance.

He moved a little in the bed and.

Ah, okay, ow. Ow, yeah, that...there was a lot of pain, still – mind you, Steve had known there would be. You didn't get away with being shot without pain, and nobody'd figured yet what to do now morphine didn't last more than an hour.

His whole left side was starting to ache, and he tried rolling his shoulder, which was just about when his vision got patchy.

~

It was somehow even darker when he came around again, and he made a mental note not to try moving until morning. He probably wasn't going to be sleeping through the pain any time soon, but he'd been sick plenty as a kid. Wasn't like he couldn't keep himself busy.

Except maybe he didn't have to – he could see someone...No, he could see Bucky in the room with him.

Middle of the night, middle of nowhere, and there was Bucky.

“Hey,” Steve said, but his voice was rough and he didn't so much speak as make a noise that could have been anything, even in the middle of the night in a place so far from the city Steve wasn't even sure their lighting was electric.

Bucky didn't say anything, looking out of the bedroom window. Steve was only certain it was Bucky because of the way he held himself – nobody else stood like that, Steve would know him anywhere. 

“Buck?” he said, and that was better – that at least sounded like English. “What're you doin' up?”

Bucky didn't answer him. Steve waited a little while – Bucky did that sometimes, could be introspective to the point that it almost seemed like he hadn't heard. But he'd always turn and flash that grin put Steve's mind at ease.

Except that...he didn't.

“Bucky,” Steve said again and, this time, cautiously getting an elbow under his side to sit up a little didn't push him into unconsciousness, even though it was monumentally uncomfortable.

Bucky still didn't answer him, didn't even turn around, and Steve found himself caught somewhere between admonished and irritated.

“Buck, what, you don't even wanna talk to me?” he said. 

It seemed Bucky didn't. 

“Bucky,” Steve said and then, after a few more seconds of Bucky's stony silence, “come on, Buck, I...”

He sighed through his nose.

“Look, I know you're...I know you're mad at me, Bucky, but it's...I...Bucky, I don't...”

Bucky didn't even turn to look at him.

“Wow, Jeez, Buck, way to make a guy feel wanted.”

Steve stared at him for a few moments longer, and then lowered himself back onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling. 

“Look, I...I'm not- I'm not sorry, Buck, you...You would'a done the same but I...I...I don't blame you for hatin' me right now.”

Bucky still didn't say anything, didn't answer Steve, didn't move as far as Steve could hear, and Steve stared at the ceiling until his eyelids grew heavy, and didn't even notice when he slipped back into sleep.

***

**England, 1943**

They were in London. They didn't always get the chance, and their leave was far between, but here they were, in the same bar they'd been to every single time.

“Don't you fellas wanna find a new place to drain dry?” Steve asked once.

Dugan had just fixed him with a stare. 

“You don't fix what ain't broke, Cap'n,” he'd said.

“Ah, superstitious bugger, are we?” Falsworth had smirked.

“You're welcome to go somewhere else, h'if h'it pleases 'is Majesty,” Dugan had mocked.

And Falsworth had followed the rest of them.

Now, Steve was busy sorting Gabe out after Lea, the bartender, had cut him off.

“I don't want to tell you boys not to have a good time,” he's said, the apology clear in his voice.

Steve had told him not to apologise.

“You're just doing your job,” he said.

And if he was a little more inclined to listen to Lea because he reminded Steve of this asthmatic blond kid he'd known once, well...that was nobody's business but his own. And maybe Bucky's.

Bucky had ducked out early that night, citing a headache. Steve didn't think that was the truth but he hadn't protested it. Bucky woulda known he didn't buy it, of course, but that was just fine. The excuses were for other peoples' ears.

“Come on,” Steve told him, “you're gonna feel like hell come tomorrow.”

And Gabe went with him easily enough. They were good guys, all of them, did as they were told, had a good time but didn't take anybody's head off – he'd seen a couple guys who did. And sure, you couldn't blame them if you knew the kinda thing they'd seen, but civilians didn't have a clue, and didn't need to pay for that. They were at war, for God's sake, everybody had enough on their minds.

But Gabe seemed happy enough to be led, and Steve didn't begrudge him the downtime.

“You have a good night?” he said wryly, and Gabe snorted.

“Yes, Sir, I had a good night,” he said. “I had such a good night I barely remember it.”

Steve laughed softly, making sure to keep his arm around Gabe. Some of London's streets were uneven enough to be a hazard to a guy who'd had maybe just a little too much.

“You be tellin' your girl about it?” Steve asked.

Gabe laughed openly at that, and Steve glanced around to make sure nobody had windows open, that nobody was gonna stick their head out into the street and tell them to pipe down.

“She knows I spend my downtime in a bar, Cap,” he said. “Ain't tellin' her who drags me home.”

“Steve, Gabe,” Steve answered. “Ain't gotta call me Cap while we're off duty.”

“Aw, shucks,” Gabe answered, just as wry as Steve'd been. “But how'd I look you in the eye in the morning?”

“I don't know,” Steve said. “I kinda like havin' a name I don't share with a country.”

Gabe was easy enough to settle in 'cause he was a quiet enough drunk. Usually subdued and reserved around others, he tended to become a lot quicker to smile and a little less tense. Steve couldn't imagine the kind of tense Gabe had to keep back in the States – didn't suppose he ever would – but Gabe seemed to trust the boys, at least, thank God, and the English forces they'd run into were a little better about letting Gabe sit, and drink, where he wanted. 

“You're all right, Cap,” Gabe sad at one point, but he was half asleep so Steve just thanked him and let him be. 

He'd have a hell of a hangover in the morning, but hangovers were nothing unusual when he and the boys took downtime.

~

He decided he didn't feel the need to read this evening. He could have, but he was pretty tired himself – socialising was never something he'd taken to. He'd been shy in social circumstances, despite the bulldog tenacity with other things, and usually he'd been ignored anyway. Plus, when you gotta keep an eye on your blood and your heart and your eyes, ears and lungs, not to mention the way his back and his feet wouldn't cooperate, it didn't leave a lot of room (or money) for heading out on the town.

Which meant that, although sitting around a table with his team was just fine, it was easier with Bucky by his side, and damn near impossible as his team turned in or took their leave one by one. It left him happy, but tired, and he yawned.

It'd be nice to be back in a bed after all those cots and bunks and hard forest floors. A little soft, but Steve always thought that about what people termed 'better beds.' Growing up on what he and Bucky had, a man got used to squeaky springs and scratchy covers, and feeling chilly come morning. 

But the main reason Steve wasn't reading was that he and Bucky were sharing a room – not an uncommon occurrence – and Bucky was already lying in the dark.

Steve crept in as quietly as he could manage – Bucky hadn't been sleeping well. Actually, Bucky hadn't slept well for as long as he'd been fighting, but nobody was surprised by that. 

What was a surprise was how Bucky managed day to day. He barely seemed to sleep – was always last to bed, was always awake by the time you went to get him for his watch, was always the best at waking the others. In fact, Steve realized when he thought about it, only person sleeping less than Bucky was Steve himself. Which...well, all right if you've got the serum, Steve figured – less all right if you were one James Buchanan Barnes. 

So for him to be sleeping? Well there was a rare occasion Steve didn't want to screw up.

Bucky'd picked the bed by the wall – first in gets first choice, sure, but it also meant he could face the wall, too, meant the light from the corridor wouldn't disturb him. 

Steve shut the door behind him, real quiet like, getting down to his skivvies before he folded his uniform as best he could in the dark. He could hear Bucky breathing deep and even, and got into bed careful as he could. It wasn't so worrying usually – every bed creaked when Steve got into it these days, there was no problem there. But Bucky Barnes had learned to be a light sleeper – had learned to listen for wheezing and rasping, for coughing or teeth chattering or, a very long time ago, the sound of the kind of soul-deep sadness that both hands clasped over his mouth couldn't hide.

And if Bucky Barnes fresh outta Brooklyn could tell when a ninety-eight pound kid had to get up out of bed to go throw up again, then a six-foot, two-hundred pound supersoldier held a pretty high risk of waking Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes the sniper.

Still, though, Steve's luck held, which meant Bucky must have been nothing short of beat.

Steve looked up at where he knew the dusky-pink curtains were, tugged the quilt a little higher with all that floral pattern he couldn't really see, and settled his head on his nice, scratchy, broderie-anglaise edged pillow, knowing full well it'd probably leave marks on his cheeks by morning. It didn't matter – it'd give Bucky something to snicker at. Maybe the sleep'd do them both good – Steve certainly hoped it did something for Bucky.

He shut his eyes and breathed deep, listening to Bucky's breathing coming back at him from the far wall, to the way his newfound hearing could hear it from everywhere. The room seemed made to make the most of it and, given that it was a sound that had been a constant in Steve's existence for most of his life, it wasn't difficult to hear it as a lullaby.

~

Steve didn't know what time it was when he woke, only that he hadn't come awake by himself. There was something that had woken him – it wasn't that he was cold, but the back of his neck was prickling as though he'd worn the wrong kind of sweater with the wrong kind of blanket. 

He screwed his eyes shut and moved under the blanket to check, but it didn't cling to him awkwardly, didn't raise prickles elsewhere. So it sure as hell didn't feel like the blanket was causing it.

He shifted in bed but there was so little light coming from London, and the curtains were so thick of course, that his eyes were taking a little while to tell him where the shapes that made up the room really were and, unusually, his eyes were sore. He'd known he was tired but he hadn't really known how much. It made him want to bury his head in the pillow or pull the blanket over his head but he squinted at the general directiom of the nightstand anyway.

Sometimes, you can be so used to something that you know straight off if something's changed, even if you don't know what is. That dark alley you wander down in the middle of the night gets new trashcans and you falter for a step until your brain reminds you this is the right way to get home, or the neighbor whose place you always pass gets a cat who sits on the porch and you double-take, at the difference the little fuzzball makes to the pattern of the porch your head remembers, before you even realise there's a change.

Well whatever was standing at the end of Steve's bed sure as shit hadn't been there when he went to sleep.

Adrenaline bled hot down his spine as his diaphragm seized on a gasp, muscles snapping tight in an instant as his heart leapt into his throat.

He was halfway to moving when his eyes seemed to get a better handle on it, gave him the information he'd been missing – he could barely see a damn thing but he knew that height and breadth anywhere.

“Christ, Bucky,” he whispered into the darkness. “You scared the life outta me, you mook, what the hell are you doin'?”

Bucky didn't answer him. The room was silent, and Bucky with it. He didn't speak or nothin', didn't make a move to face Steve, and Steve sat up in bed.

“Bucky?” he said softly.

He'd heard of this kind of thing, of course. He didn't know if it was sleepwalking or just plan nightmares and disorientation – he knew a story of a guy like that, lived in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, who couldn't tell sometimes (so Steve's Ma said) where he was or who he was talking to. She said it was brought on by the war, and Steve didn't question that. 

But he wondered if it maybe was something like that, that maybe Bucky didn't know about the world around him when it was the middle of the night and the whole place was dark, and got up to make sure he was safe or something.

“Buck, it's me, Steve,” he tried, and he thought he saw Bucky's head move, but the room was so dark he could barely see, felt like it was darker than it had any right to be. 

Even the forests they ran missions in weren't this black at night – but Bucky was definitely facing the door, like he was afraid of somebody coming in, or keeping watch or something. 

“You remember? We got leave in London, been out for a drink and you turned in early, Bucky. D'you remember that?” 

Bucky still didn't say nothing, stock still and silent. 

“Bucky, are you awake?” Steve asked.

Problem is, when it's dark, the longer you stare at something, the less you see it. The shadows seem to grow and you lose the details and, just like that – not a word, not another sound, just total silence – Steve lost him for a second in the pitch blackness, all the shadows kinda melting into one big shadow, swallowing Bucky up like he'd stepped into molasses, and Steve squinted in the dark, tried to find out where Bucky was.

Steve was just about to try for the nightstand when he heard movement from Bucky's bed.

“You back in bed, Buck?” he asked, and Bucky made a noise.

“Mmmph,” he said. “I'm awake. What's...Steve?”

“Sorry, buddy,” he said, “go back to sleep, it's fine. Don't worry about it, I was just checkin' you were all right.”

“Mmmmh, weird....dream,” he said, “but....it's...mmm...” but his voice got real quiet at the end, slurred, and the sound of Bucky's breathing as it evened out into sleep again was enough to soothe Steve's nerves some.

Steve had gotten such a fright that his heart had beat so fast he couldn't hear over it, a thudding in his ears that had blocked everything out so well before that Bucky might just as well not have been breathing at all. 

It had happened like this once or twice since the first time with the tent – once Bucky was standing near Steve's bedroll even though it wasn't his watch. Once, he'd come in to look at the maps on the wall over from where Steve had been drawing up plans for their next assault at maybe four in the morning, and Steve had nearly said hello to him, except Bucky'd left without even turning to glance at him – Steve hadn't even seen him go.

There were a few other times, too, but Steve figured it had to be something like what his Ma said. It made sense. And at least Steve didn't think less of him for it.

Steve settled down again in the covers, pulled them up and shut his eyes, not that it made much difference in the dark. For what Bucky'd gone through, the fact that the only problem seemed to be that he sometimes couldn't sleep at night was a miracle all by itself. 

~

In the morning, Steve looked at Bucky as they dressed, looked at him careful when he turned around and looked back.

“Y'okay?” he said, and Bucky nodded.

“Sure,” he said. 

And it wasn't as though Steve couldn't see the look in Bucky's eye, wasn't as though he hadn't been in the room last night or around Bucky every waking moment since they'd blown Schmidt's factory up in Austria.

But he'd known Bucky his whole life, knew just how easy it was to get him to admit to something being wrong – about as easy as it was to get Steve to admit to the same kinda thing.

And so Steve knew there wasn't a damn thing he could do to get Bucky to talk about what Bucky didn't want to talk about.

So that was that.

***

**Italy, 1945**

Once night fell, they'd pretty much finished pitching camp. Steve had done the necessary latrine-digging, because nobody could dig a six foot hole like a supersoldier, and Morita and Falsworth had made a fire. They were ready to douse it if need be, but there didn't expect any need to – they'd done their jobs and they had their intel. 

Bucky set up a couple of nice little gifts from Howard to make sure nobody'd sneak up on them, and then Gabe very kindly set about making their standard issue sludge-with-a-pinch-of-coffee-flavor.

Thing was, they were on their way back. They'd taken out another of Schmidt's bases and then taken a detour to liberate a particularly useful set of documented developments. They only knew about the storage bunker because Steve and Bucky had taken a detour in the factory in case there'd been a wing like the one Bucky'd been in. 

There'd been a wing. There'd been nobody alive there. 

But some of their gathered information had turned up a couple of gems – they'd taken it back to their in-field base and get the go-ahead on the next phase of the operation. 

Schmidt was a madman, not a doubt, but he couldn't do it alone. The vision was his, but the work?

“I'm gonna be honest,” Bucky muttered around his mouthful, “I'm gonna have a hell of a time not just tearin' the son of a bitch to shreds with my bare fuckin' hands, Stevie.”

Steve nodded, tapping Bucky's shoulder with his own in the firelight.

“I'm gonna have a hell of a time stoppin' you – but you know what it means if we can get 'im.”

Bucky snorted.

“You mean if he don't neck one a' those pretty white pills they're so hot on?” he said. “Sure - means I get to look the bastard in the face from the other side of the table. See what interrogation from the SSR's like. 'M sure Howard can make me somethin' _nice.”_

Steve wasn't sure about that, but he didn't say anything. They both of 'em knew it was just talk – as much as Steve wanted to kill every last thing that hurt Bucky Barnes, as much as Bucky wanted to destroy everything that'd ever finagled the upper hand without a fair fight, they neither of them were the type to sacrifice good information for a personal vendetta.

Part of Steve was a little mad about it, but Schmidt couldn't do jack without his fink, and getting him to talk could win them the war. From what Steve had seen – and what Bucky remembered – Zola wasn't exactly the type to resist for too long.

~

When they said their goodnights, Bucky offered to take first watch. Steve decided against it – Bucky was, looking gaunt and tired, and Gabe had suggested he and Jaques take first watch, anyways. 

“You'n I'll take morning watch, Buck, get up nice and early and wake the rest a' these crumbs.”

“ 'Ey!” Dugan said, purely as a formality, and Bucky's mouth twitched into a smile that didn't reach his eyes, same as any smile these days.

Something hadn't been right with Bucky for a long time now, but he wouldn't give Steve much more than a shrug if Steve tried to talk to him about it. Steve had even brought up the how-would-you-like-it argument, but it didn't work well considering Bucky'd been dealing with him doing the very same for most of their lives.

“Sure,” Bucky said, and he and Steve got out their bedrolls and settled down with Dugan and Morita on either side of the fire.

It didn't take Steve long to fall asleep and, though he knew the change of watch would wake him, he didn't expect to find himself fully conscious again until either Morita or Dugan woke him to start his own.

~

Steve woke fast and sudden because something woke him, but he woke to darkness and an absence of sound so strong it was as though someone had called out and then fallen silent. The fire had gone out, there was nobody on watch, and there were no bedrolls around him as far as he could see. It made no sense, but his immediate situation seemed to call for a little more than staying on the forest floor and trying to figure out what had happened. 

He didn't move for a couple of seconds – lying on dead leaves meant he had to be sure of his actions before scrabbling around and giving himself away.

His shield was close enough that he could move his arm and curl his hand into the strap, his gun not too far away. He didn't know why he'd been left his weapons if everybody else had gone, but he didn't much care to waste time figuring it out while he was prone and facing the wrong way to see anything useful.

The whole place was dark – far darker than he'd've anticipated. He'd been to compounds in the dark where the lights were on and vehicles were moving, and he'd been in camp in forests where the moon was out or fires were burning and men were on watch but this....

This was like...

Steve had never seen anything like this. The air around him seemed to echo, the blackness full of a mist that was blue to Steve's enhanced sight as it crept over the roots of the trees. 

He decided on his direction – he'd run to the nearest tree big enough to hide him, and see if he could get a better look at camp. He had a pretty good chance of running directly towards anyone who might be watching the camp and waiting for him to move, but alone and in the dark he stood a better chance as a moving target than he did as a sitting duck.

He feigned a stretch and managed to get his hand within grabbing distance of his gun, and then he tensed his whole body and shoved himself up, made a break for it towards the camp's two o'clock, where the tree stood. It felt like it took forever to get his feet under him, but he did it, sprinting with his shield up and his gun in hand.

Once he was there, blood was roaring in his ears and hot with adrenaline, he chanced a glance back at the camp.

As he'd suspected, the logs they'd hauled over for seats were empty, utensils discarded and so discoloured Steve might have thought they were rusty, the fire nothing more than a pile of charred remnants, and there were no other bedrolls by the-

Wait, no, that's wasn't right – Bucky's was there. Empty, but present, and Steve bit his lip, debating what to do next when the sharp, hollow, high crack of snapping wood sounded behind him maybe twenty feet away.

It was far enough behind him that Steve whirled, gun in hand, ready to start firing shots in the dark, trying his utmost to keep still and watch carefully. It had been so loud and with such familiarity that Steve's knuckles ached suddenly – it _had_ to have been wood because knuckles didn't sound like that, but that was what it had sounded like. _Bone_.

He scanned his surroundings, eyes open wide, waiting to catch sight of someone or something that would tell him who was with him, and he would never know what stayed his hand when he saw a figure in the darkness.

It made his heart leap, made his lungs seize but, no sooner had he levelled his gun than he couldn't shoot.

Perhaps it was instinctive even then – the person was standing stock still, like a statue, in the middle of the forest, nothing more than a hazy silhouette, but Steve still didn't shoot. The figure didn't move, and Steve couldn't tell if it was facing his way or not, it was so dark.

Keeping his gun and his shield up, which was no mean feat considering, Steve stepped forward slowly.

“Identificati!” he said.

The figure did not, stock still in the silence, the forest fallen eerily silent in the night and the fog.

Steve started to walk, slow, eyes on his target. 

“Identifizierent Sie sich!”

Nothing, 

Steve kept going, leaves crunching under his feet as he got closer – fifteen feet.

“Identifiez-vous!” he called out, and still the figure didn't move.

There was something wrong, something making goosebumps rise on his skin, something raising the hair on the back of his neck with each step he took. Ten feet.

“Identify yourself, _now_!” he said and, when he was five feet away, his spine snapped straight with the hair-raising sensation of someone standing behind him.

He turned again, halfway, bringing his gun around in one move.

Nothing. 

No-one, not a sound, and not even the camp he'd come from was visible through the trees, the very shapes of it swallowed up by the blackness that seemed to be all around.

He turned back and found that the back of the silhouette was _right in front of him_ -”

“STEVE!”

~

“Jesus!” Steve gasped, his whole body jerking sideways across the forest floor, off his bedroll and into dry leaves. 

“Shit, sorry, Cap,” Morita was saying, and Steve scrabbled at the ground as though it might swallow him up and then stopped and _stared._

It was still night, but the fire was burning strong and bright. Steve was still where he'd fallen asleep, and there was no fog, no strange dust motes. Dugan was halfway into his blankets and staring in surprise at Steve, and Steve was...

Steve was just fine, apparently.

“What the hell,” he said, covering his pounding heart with one palm.

Morita, holding both hands up by his shoulders, said,

“Beats me,” he said. “Didn't mean to startle you.”

Steve only shook his head.

“Wasn't you,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Bad dreams?” Morita said, and Steve looked at him.

“Somethin' like it,” he said. “Pretty...” he swallowed, heart pounding so hard he could feel the flutter in the hollow of his throat. “Pretty nasty.”

He turned to look at Bucky and found Bucky's bedroll unoccupied.

“What?” he said. “Hey, where's-”

“Over there,” Morita answered, pointing over to the camp's two o'clock, and Steve stared at Morita for a second before he followed Morita's pointing hand, half expecting to see strangely luminous fog swirling around the base of the trees.

There wasn't any. Steve looked back at Morita.

“God, that one messed me up, Jim,” he muttered, but he got his feet under him and gave Morita a nod as Morita started to cross back to his own piece of forest floor.

Bucky wasn't too far away. In fact, as Steve passed the biggest tree on the outskirts of their camp, he was standing maybe twenty feet out, with his back to Steve, staring up at the waning last-quarter of a moon that was bright enough and low enough to cast Bucky's shadow all the way back to Steve.

He looked uncannily like the figure out of Steve's nightmare, and Steve found that his throat clicked when he went to speak Bucky's name. Bucky seemed to know anyhow, and turned to look over his shoulder at Steve, his face a mask of shadow.

“Hey,” he said, his voice rough, and the tension Steve had been carrying in his shoulders eased, the knot in his stomach loosened.

“Hey,” he answered, a little at a loss for what to say. “You...lookin' at the moon?”

He heard Bucky's huff of amusement.

“You're as bad at makin' small talk as y'are with dames,” he said, and he walked toward Steve, and then past him, clapping Steve on the shoulder as he passed. “We up?”

Steve turned to walk after him.

“Yeah,” he said. “You feelin' okay?”

“Sure am,” Bucky answered, reaching for his canteen before he took a seat on one of the logs. “Maybe I ought'a be askin' you – you look even paler'n usual.”

Steve waved a hand as he took a seat next to Bucky. Dugan had kindly left his cards out for them, so Steve started to shuffle.

“Bad dream,” he said. “Don't worry about it.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Bucky answered, and he pulled his pack of Luckies out his pocket, snagged one between his teeth and held out the packet. “You want a snipe?”

Steve looked at the proffered Luckies for a moment and tried not to picture the fire dying, or the swirling mist, or the strange set of the figures shoulders that at once seemed unrecognizable and completely familiar.

“Sure,” he said, taking one for himself while Bucky grabbed a stick off the fire to light them. “Why not?”

***

**London, 1945**

Peggy didn't look surprised when he said it, when he said what he meant. 

He recalled a couple years before – felt like a lifetime now – when he'd said he didn't want to kill anyone, and he told her about it too. There wasn't any need to keep it to himself now, hadn't been for a while.

“Whatever it is we can give you to wipe them off the face of Earth, we'll give it to you, Captain,” she answered.

He nodded, his head spinning. How could it be – he'd spoken to Bucky yesterday, he'd shared meals with him. It felt like someone had blown a hole in his side like they'd blown a hole in the train. Steve wasn't drunk, God how he wished he could be drunk, but he was gonna be sick.

“How?” he whispered, didn't even know he'd said it – but she knew what he meant by it. 

She sat down next to him, at their regular table in the blown-out bar, and poured herself a drink from the bottle that wouldn't have made a difference to him even if he'd been able to feel it. 

_How can this be happening?_

“God,” he muttered.

She put one cool hand on his wrist. 

“I lost my brother, too,” she said, and Steve covered his face with his hand so she wouldn't see.

She knew anyway – they both knew that.

He could almost imagine Bucky out of the corner of his eye, in the corner of the bar. He could almost feel Bucky's presence behind him, tall and tired and a little off but still the guy he knew. He could almost believe he could turn around and see Bucky standing by the table. _What's the matter, pal, didn't think they could keep a slugger like me down, didja?_

But, when he went to pick up another bottle from behind the bar just in case all it took was quantity, when he pulled a bottle down off the mirrored shelf and could have sworn there was someone he knew standing in the shadows over the other side of the bombed-out bar, when he whipped around so fast he almost fell, he still knew – if he was being honest with himself – just what it was he was gonna see before he even saw it.

Nobody.

There was nobody there any more.

~

Steve was standing by the map in the briefing room, well aware that his suggestion would have been insane coming from anyone else.

“Captain Rogers,” Phillips' unmistakable drawl reached him, and Steve turned his head to show he was listening, running over his own calculations in his head just to be sure before he turned.

“Colonel,” he said, sketching a salute.

Phillips gave the kind of wince that suggested he was annoyed Steve hadn't learned anything, and waved the salute away to reinforce his point. Everybody was doing that – waiving rules, foregoing formality. Steve had seen it done once or twice before – with an officer who'd lost his wife when the public bomb shelter he'd suggested to them had collapsed, another time for a guy Steve had rescued in Azzano found out the letters he'd been sending were going to a pile of rubble and a family who hadn't survived it. Steve had always thought he'd be more upset about it than he was but, instead, it was a comfort – a show of respect he valued above everything.

“You better be damn sure about this, Son,” Phillips told him.

Steve turned back and looked at the map. 

“Never been surer of anything in my life,” he answered. 

And Phillips came to look at the map, too, examining their rendezvous points, Steve's drop point, and the Hydra base they knew Schmidt would be hiding at.

“You know,“ Phillips said, “first time I saw you, I couldn't figure out what the hell that German lunatic saw in you.”

And then he turned around, and walked away.

Steve looked back over his shoulder to watch after a couple of seconds, but he went back to the map a moment later, aware of his eyes playing tricks on him. Or maybe, maybe his eyes weren't playing tricks – maybe his mind was putting things in because it expected those things to be there.

Worse, maybe it was something that flickered about on the periphery of his memory until he'd had cause to consider it all the time – one of the old ladies on their block used to speak about luck and talismans and charms and omens, spinning tales about inhumans and dopplegangers whose sightings meant death for those who saw them.

Steve ignored the familiar shape he could almost perceive in the corner of the room. He'd seen it before and hadn't died yet.

***

**1945, 2,500ft above the Arctic Circle, and falling**

“We'll have the band play somethin' slow,” he said, as the biting wind shrieked past his head, hair whipping his forehead, cheeks so cold they burned. 

He wasn't afraid. 

He wasn't alone.

He knew whose figure he could see out of the corner of his eye, who was standing in the corner of the cockpit, unmoved by the screaming whistle of the wind outside and unafraid of the whine of the engines.

He knew who'd come to take him home.

“I'd hate to step on your-”

***

**2011, New York**

Steve only knows how wrong he was, when he wakes.

Alone.


	2. The 21st Century

**2011, New York**

When they put him back in the car, he doesn't speak. 

He doesn't look out of the window, doesn't look around, doesn't speak to any of the armed men in the car with them. He could get out of this, almost easily. The men are armed, but they're armed with guns. Whether they shoot bullets or blue light, it doesn't matter. They wear black helmets and black goggles and black armor with white acronyms stamped across them. The acronyms are unfamiliar – the black on black is not.

Going with them is unfamiliar too but, if this is a ruse, it's a good one and he needs to see it through until he finds a flaw to exploit, a crack to lever open.

If it's true, then he can't think of a reason to fight anyway.

They arrive back at the huge glass and chrome building whose suited occupants are still in disarray, and Steve is led inside. There are no shackles – there don't need to be. Weapons are no longer raised, but are still drawn. 

“Welcome to the SHIELD facility in New York,” Eyepatch says. 

Steve doesn't answer him.

The ceilings are high and even though Steve knows, could see from the street outside, that there are more floors above them, there seem to be frosted skylights all along the corridors. There are bars, turnstiles, glass gates and men in suits whose jacket seams fall oddly enough to bely the weapons they conceal.

This is a prison, Steve can be almost certain of it. A secure facility meant to keep people out and to keep people in.

“If you'd like to press your hand to the scanner,” Eyepatch says and Steve looks first at Eyepatch and then at the square metal bollard, topped with another sheet of glass.

Then he looks at Eyepatch again. Will they force him if he refuses? Will they refuse _him_ if he fails to comply? This thing looks like a metal post but Steve doesn't know what it does. It might want his blood for identification (always a bad sign) or for his genetic material (a worse sign) or maybe it'll just take his entire hand (not preferable).

Eyepatch looks at him wryly before he shrugs minutely.

“It can wait,” he says, and they move forward.

~

Steve is taken to a war room, or some approximation of one.

The men in black armor and masks wait outside, and Eyepatch follows him in.

“Take a seat, Cap,” Eyepatch says, gesturing to the only chair that's pulled out from the table.

Steve does not. Eyepatch doesn't ask again.

Steve also does not not to show how it makes him bristle to be called something so familiar by someone so unfamiliar.

It is comforting, however, to see a man like Eyepatch. There's certainly not a chance in hell that Hitler's regime would employ a man whose skin is so far from the required criteria. Still, Schmidt never gave a good God-damn about skin colour - _everyone_ was inferior in his mind. Steve is still half-expecting Zola's voice to bleed out of hidden speakers. 

“You're in a secure facility, in the middle of New York, in the year 2011,” Eyepatch says. “The Allies won World War Two thanks to the actions and sacrifices of many brave men, yourself included. Following this Victory, the FBI and CIA were joined by the SSR as part of this country's security services. This facility belongs to the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, abbreviated to SHIELD, and developed from the aforementioned Strategic Scientific Reserve.

“I am Nicholas J. Fury, director of this organisation. My title is Director, you may refer to me as 'Director' or 'Sir' until such time as we are well enough acquainted for you to refer to me by my abbreviated Christian name in a one-to-one situation. My ethnicity is African-American. You may refer to me as 'African-American,' a 'person of color,' or 'black,' but the lattermost term should be used to refer to others only after obtaining permission from each individual. Any other terms you may be accustomed to using, including those considered less derogatory, are no longer socially acceptable, I guarantee it.

“While we have prepared the beginning of an orientation programme to provide you with adequate material for you to get back into the world, the programme will first focus on the conclusion of World War Two and then on changes in term and meaning for words you may be accustomed to using.

“I would imagine you got a lot of questions, Cap. Anything you think I can answer before we move on?

“How do I get out of here?” Steve says.

“You walk,” Nicholas J. Fury answers.

Of course. After having several cars full of armed officers sent into the middle of Times Square to chase him down, after they've come back in through scanners and glass gates and turnstiles past men in suits who are armed to the teeth, Steve can expect to just get up and leave.

Who the hell does this guy think he is? The assault team dressed like Hydra, the rooms are cold and bare like Hydra's.

“Why should I trust you?” Steve says.

Nicholas J. Fury smiles, cocks his head.

“I don't imagine we've given you much reason to trust us,” he says. “But one of the reasons I'm here is because we'd like you to.”

Steve opens his mouth. 

There's one more question, but the words don't come for a long time and, when they do, they're thick and painful.

“Who's left?” 

Fury looks at him for a long moment, his expression unreadable. There's not as much hardness there, and Steve is more afraid of the answer now he knows he's going to hear it.

“Margaret Carter is in her mid-nineties and is in assisted living, under medical supervision,” Fury says.

Fury keeps looking at him until Steve realizes he has nothing else to say.

Steve sits down.

***

It's like college, apparently. A number of Agents tell him so and Steve nods as though that means something to him.

He wakes up, he uses the gym, he eats, he spends the day in Orientation Classes, he eats, he uses the gym, he goes to bed.

Every.

Day.

He learns about the Manhattan Project, the Holocaust, the Cold War, and has to take a walk. He learns about chemotherapy, cellular telephones, the internet, and stares wide-eyed at the material. He hears about the advancement of medical technology and closes his eyes, hears about anti-vaxxers and has to take another walk.

He learns about the Stonewall Riots, MLK and DADT and his tutor is frowning at him until she realizes that he's not upset about marriage equality because he's from the 30s. In fact, he's not upset about it at all, he just desperately wishes he could tell someone else. She doesn't ask who he means – Steve's pretty sure she's figured it out. 

There's that, too. Books on him, programs on the television, films made about him, museum exhibits and artwork and poems and...Steve's overwhelmed by it, especially by some of the speculation writers began to make more openly during the 1980s. 

Steve spends two and a half weeks learning. They seem surprised he wants to learn on the weekends, so they make his programme available to the tablet computer they provide him with.

He turns off the voice function - He doesn't like it listening – and he takes it with him when he goes for coffee.

They give him an apartment they think will make him happy – it doesn't. For starters, it's in Manhattan. It's also decorated like his place was in Brooklyn – close, not much light. Small, with muted colours making it seem smaller. It isn't where he's used to being – Brooklyn's been gentrified, it's too expensive now. It's also too far away from the SHIELD facility, and where Steve was used to is a museum now, full of replicas, because all the remaining originals live in vaults in Washington D.C. 

There are, in the vaults, sketchbooks and photographs, and he tries not to show his desperate hope when Fury mentions the photographs. 

And so the Vaults at the Smithsonian send him boxes of his belongings. They are old, yellowed, and the fabrics are thin on the book bindings, the pages are brittle on his sketchbooks, the photographs are faded and pale but he has them, three little things to hold in his hands. 

The first is his mother's wedding photograph – the only image in which he's ever seen his father. The second is the strip of eight he and Bucky got up on Broadway at the slot photo booth when they were eighteen, and the last is a strip of eight from the same place with his mother when the booth was new and Steve wasn't even ten. He keeps them in a safe, and prints digital copies to put in frames on his chests of drawers. 

He has escorts everywhere – he's not sure if they're aware that he knows, but he spots them every time. Even at 3am, when the gym Steve frequents (owned by a man whose father was a man Steve had saved and signed a poster for) is closed to the public, and Steve is inside with the key, he knows they're watching the place from across the street.

Which is why he's not surprised when Fury shows up one night with the same kind of bland manilla folder the intelligence agencies have always used.

“Trying to get me back in the world?” Steve asks.

“Trying to save it,” Fury answers.

It's been three weeks since Bucky died. 

It's been seventy years since Steve crashed into the Arctic ice.

Some things never change.

***

It's an aircraft carrier, with all the emphasis on _air._ Dr Banner seems nice enough, and Fury makes the odd joke.

He likes Romanoff immediately. She doesn't look at him as though there's something odd about him, doesn't look at him as though she pities him.

He instantly dislikes Stark, whose anti-authority leanings are getting on Steve's nerves. Nobody's telling him anything, everybody seems to be hiding something, and instead of working with them Stark is doing whatever the hell he wants. At least Howard worked with them instead of against, or just plain separately. 

By the time Steve finds all-too-familiar masks in the weapons lockers, he wants a damned good explanation and he'll murder the first person who tries and fails to give him one.

~

There isn't time to mess around. There isn't time to stop and breathe – after Steve nearly slips right off the damned helicarrier, wind whistling in his ears, hair whipping about his face, Stark mends the engine and one of Fury's men – one that even the great Tony Stark seemed to care about – is killed.

Stark acts like it's the end of the world, presumably because he's only ever had himself to look out for, but Steve's done sitting around without any answers. It's been less than a month since his whole world was pulled out from under him, and he's not going to wait to be handed pieces of a jigsaw puzzle any longer.

Romanoff is sharp and fast, Barton is bruised and disheartened, but Steve has been watching Romanoff, has been listening to her and making a note of the way she handles people, not to mention the way she manipulated Loki. If she trusts Barton? Steve has no qualms.

He uses the uniform to get them a plane, and rides in the back until they get to Manhattan, even if he almost throws up his entire stomach when the plane gets hit.

~

It's.

Like _nothing_ he's ever seen.

Courage, he reminds himself, isn't about not-being afraid. It's about doing it anyway.

~

It's Romanoff, after everything's finished, after it's all over, who finds him.

He's on the floor of a janitor's closet and covered in grime and concrete dust, seventy years out of time, with New York city full of dead aliens and a Norse Demigod taking another Norse Demigod into custody one hundred floors above them, with a rage monster, a man in a robot suit and apparently the greatest marksman in the world, and it feels like he's having a heart-attack. He's dealt with Nazis and disintegration and serum and this is just so _big_ inside of him.

He can't breathe, he can't move, he feels as though the ceiling is lowering to crush him and it is singularly the most mortifying experience of his life when he finds himself unable to pull in a lungful of air as though he still had the asthma, unable to move as though he were still weak and stiff, unable to stop the hot spill that wells up in his eyes and brands lines down his cheeks, and it's she who finds him first.

“Okay,” she says, as though this is normal, as though this doesn't make him a coward, and she closes the door behind herself. 

She crouches in front of him, pulls his head against her shoulder and wraps her arms around his back. 

“Breathe,” she says. “I know it's difficult, but do it with me. In.”

It takes him a long time, and it's difficult, but eventually he does. The worst of it is, it's not something he's in control of. It's not as though he's a sobbing wreck – he's just unable to function. His eyes are streaming and his lungs have seized and he can't even draw the breath to apologise.

“You're having a panic attack,” she says. “It's normal.”

 _Normal_ is subjective.

“The adrenaline is wearing off, so your body is panicking now that you're safe.”

It feels like dying, it's upsetting and mortifying and it _hurts,_ but it's just him and Romanoff in the Janitor's closet. There's no vision standing in the corner this time, and he doesn't know if that means he's going to live.

~

When they get upstairs, Stark asks what took them so long.

She doesn't even look at Steve when she says,

“Autographs,” and leaves it at that.

***

**New York, 25th December 2011**

Steve stands at the back of his church at a quarter past midnight and doesn't sing the hymns. He doesn't say the prayers – they're all in English and they're hard to say past the tightness in his chest anyway. 

He takes communion. He kneels and he prays but he knows what he wants is beyond any prayer. Who ever heard of God sending a man back in time just because he asked?

His priest knows who he is, and clasps his hand before he leaves instead of shaking it. He tells Steve that Steve can always come here, speak to him or to God, he says Steve is loved no matter how distant that love may seem, and that Steve's church, Steve's city, is forever in his debt.

Steve thanks him, wishes him a Merry Christmas and leaves. 

When he gets back to his apartment, Romanoff is waiting for him, Barton by her side. They're both of them holding bottles.

“What?” Steve says.

“Aw, Cap,” Barton says. “That any way to greet your guests?” 

Steve rolls his eyes but lets them in because he doesn't want to be out in the corridor.

“What do you need, Fury send you?”

Nat holds up her bottle.

“Merry Christmas, Steve,” she says.

“Yeah, Merry Christmas, Steve,” Barton says too.

Steve frowns at them.

“Guys, I'm not doing anything,” he says. “I don't want to- I'm not- I can either spend it in church or in bed and I've been to church already. And I don't- I don't have anything for you. I didn't get you anything.”

“You're not having a meal?” Clint says, bypassing that last part completely, and Steve shakes his head.

He's set two places at the table, knows Natasha has seen. He always sets two on special occasions. 

“That's fine,” Natasha says. “We'll get Chinese. Have you had Chinese?” 

Steve has done a lot of things – he's been listening to audio books of important cultural works while he's been in the gym. He's watched important pop-culture and cult films at double speed because his media player will do that and his mind will process it. He's been to museums and coffee shops, he's gone for runs and taken a drive every now and again. He has a motorcycle but he doesn't often use it, not in New York.

“I never had Chinese,” he says. “And I don't need-”

“Well you go to bed if you want,” she says. “We don't have anywhere to go, though, and we're not on active duty so we're not allowed in-facility residence right now. Can I sleep on your couch?”

“Hey!” Clint says, and then his shoulders slump. “Can I sleep on your _floor_ then?” 

Steve passes his hand over his eyes.

He wants to be by himself. He feels alone, and betrayed by the universe, and sad, and he hates himself and everything around him. He's been holding it together for months - can't he be allowed to lie face-down in his pillows and self-pity in peace on the one day of the year he misses everybody the most?

“Have a drink,” Nat says, and her voice is softer, quieter. 

“I can't get drunk,” he says automatically.

“Man,” Clint answers. “I mean, that sucks but that's not why we brought the good stuff, you know? It tastes good, you can drink it anyway.”

Steve sighs hard through his nose but gives in. He knows they'll persist if he doesn't.

He's got a small tree on a small table in the lounge that Nat suggested. By which he means, she gave it to him on his way home about a week before. It came pre-lit and pre-decorated and Steve could have wept when he plugged it in because it was beautiful and he remembered making decorations out of salt dough and newspaper and shivering through his half of an orange and being happy as he'd ever been. 

He hasn't put up a wreath but he's got a candle that he's burned a little of every day, with numbers down the side to show him when to stop. He doesn't have gifts. He doesn't have decorations. He isn't going out to celebrate and he won't be celebrating while he stays in.

Nat turns the lights low – puts on the table lamps instead of the overheads and makes the room feel warmer because of it – while Clint makes up the hot chocolate he brought with him and, when they all sit down in Steve's living room, she puts on the television and tunes it into a radio station that's playing carols.

It's then that he realizes they're not here because they've got nowhere else to go, but because _he_ has nowhere else to go. He has nobody left to share this with, and so they're here so he won't be alone. And, when he realizes, it suddenly becomes hard to speak.

They drink their hot chocolate in silence for a little bit, but Steve finds it hard to swallow any, and Nat puts one small hand on his wrist – such a small gesture, so familiar both of her and to Steve. And he sniffs, presses his lips together.

“I miss 'em,” he whispers, and the two of them nod, sit a little closer.

They talk – or, really, they let Steve talk. And it hurts, oh it hurts, but he knows they'll never tell anyone else how much, or just what it does to Steve to say so.

~

“So when are you guys back on duty?” he asks on New Years' eve. 

Clint shrugs.

“I still got my probationary period to pass but Nat'll be back to the old 'if-I-tell-you-I'll-have-to-kill-you' probably....when, would you say?”

Nat just raises an eyebrow.

“Right,” Steve nods, rolling his eyes. 

“You should think about relocating,” Natasha tells him.

She's learned a lot about him in the past week, and he finds that he doesn't mind.

He thought he would – considered never making any friends in this era at all, because he'll lose them too eventually, he's certain of it. But Nat and Clint crawled in under cover of hot chocolate, and now he's glad at least somebody knows how miserable he's been.

“You hate it here,” Clint says from his spot on the floor, and Steve pulls a face.

“I don't hate it in New York,” he says, “just in this apartment.” 

Clint snorts, but Nat's wry smile is replaced by very obviously put-on earnestness. 

“I bet you'd love D.C.,” she says, and Steve pretends he's trying to kick her but can't quite reach,

She pretends she's mildly worried about it.

“I don't know, Nat,” he says. “Everything's so different already.”

Clint rocks his head back and looks at Steve.

“Maybe you need the break,” he says. “Just take a little time and go somewhere that doesn't feel like it's changed so much.”

Steve looks out of the window. Some people, because humans are impatient creatures, are already setting off fireworks even though they've got an hour to go.

“I'll think about it,” he says, “maybe talk to Fury.”

Nat nods, takes a sip of her beer.

“We should go out on the roof at midnight,” she says. “It's tradition, right?”

Steve chews the inside of his cheek for a moment before he nods slowly.

Yeah, it was.

***

**2012, Washington D.C.**

Steve knows the move unsettles him, because he's getting what he wanted but he still feels on edge.

His new apartment is big and light and modern, which is a miracle considering it's in the nation's Capital. It's also in a predominantly...accepting neighbourhood, and Steve doesn't know if that was an accident, a recommendation or a test. Whichever, it means that there's a nice selection of bars to choose from when Nat helps him move in, and she doesn't even raise an eyebrow at the flag over the door, doesn't even give Steve a sly 'oh, really?' expression. She just walks straight in beside him.

She's got a fake wedding ring (he assumes - maybe it's real) to keep unwanted attention away – he can see disappointed faces almost as soon as they sit down – but it's a quiet place, so they buy a drink and order food because the bar's still serving food this time of day, and settle in for a quiet evening.

When he goes home, she goes with him and makes sure he's unpacked enough to get a good night's sleep, and then she leaves him a nicer coffee machine than the one he had in Manhattan as a 'housewarming gift,' and says she'll see him Monday.

~

“Nick,” Steve says, as he walks into Nick's office.

Nick nods, gestures to the chair on the other side of his desk, and Steve takes a seat.

He doesn't have his new uniform yet, so he's wearing the outfit he does most of his training in – compression shirt and track pants. He knows it's not up to code – people have been giving him funny looks all morning – but his new suit is being manufactured to be an advantage in his new position; working alongside a Covert Ops team. He's not going to be taking them – they're not his to take – but it will be mostly the same as if he had. 

They have a separate leader – a guy Steve doesn't know that well yet, but he seems...

It's hard to tell, actually. He seems a little more like Hodge than like Steve, but Hodge is dead and Rumlow isn't, and he treats Steve with genuine respect and admiration. They've already trained together and he _is_ good at being Steve's SIC, regardless of the breadth of his masculinity and the tone of his jokes. Steve doesn't find it hard to respect him, he's just aware – as he's always been – that some things are better left undiscussed. 

“You'll be running your first op with the STRIKE team in three days,” Nick says, handing over another of those manilla folders while the thing that looks like a giant, black mirror runs realtime air-traffic and satellite information. “And if everything goes well, you and STRIKE team one will be our new Covert Ops go-to team.”

“Understood,” Steve answers, scanning the documents. 

He can multitask if he's in the right mindset, and his memory is good enough that he can memorise everything he needs for as long as he needs to remember it for.

“Rumlow tells me he thought he'd have more of a problem with you,” Nick says. “You're not knocking heads over this?”

Steve rolls one shoulder in a shrug.

“They're his team,” he says. “I'm askin' him nicely to ask them nicely to do what I say.”

“Well, respect from a man like Rumlow is hard to get,” Nick says. “And easy to lose.”

“Let me guess,” Steve answers raising an eyebrow. “Unflinching loyalty, relative obedience and fast admittance of your own mistakes and you're good. Ask me how I know.”

Nick's expression changes in a way that means he's as close to a smile as he ever is, and he looks over at the map on the wall.

“I trust you know how to handle yourself,” he says. “There are a couple things I've got my eye on already.”

“Well,” Steve says, getting to his feet because he's always been good at spotting the end of a conversation with his superiors, “I'm done making long-term plans, so you know where to find me.”

***

Steve works really, really well with Rumlow, as it turns out.

Meeting him was nerve-wracking in the same way meeting people always is – if your personalities clash, you have a big problem. But Rumlow was respectful, attentive, and spoke to Steve like a superior officer (which Steve kind of is) rather than a national icon (which Steve is wearing the uniform of), and Steve knew when they trained together that they'd work well in the field.

Actually being in the field with Rumlow though?

It's a feeling he's missed.

Rumlow and his men move quickly, preciseley and silently, they give their input when Steve is working through plans, they defer to Steve more often than not, and they listen to the answers when they ask questions. And they _ask questions._ Steve couldn't be happier – he never got anywhere wandering blindly about on the word of one man, and neither did...

Even that's changed, he remembers. They're known as the Howling Commandos now.

Steve just used to call them 'his men,' and they were all as mismatched and inquisitive and brave and calculating as each other. It's good to have a team at his back again.

By the time they're back off their first run together, Steve is barely able to contain himself. He does because he has to – it won't do to be unprofessional – but adrenaline thrums through his sytem and his heart is still racing, and it's been a long time since he was able to use his skills properly. Looking at him, you wouldn't necessarily think he was built for stealth, but he can be silent. He can run without a sound, hold his breath for minutes on end, slow his heart rate to almost nothing and catch his shield on the move without fail. He's _good_ \- exactly the way he always wanted to be – and _so are they_.

Rumlow claps him on the back of the shoulder as they file into the locker room, gives him a solemn nod.

“We did good,” he says. “Think we can make this a thing?”

And it's odd form someone who's technically his subordinate, but it makes a difference Steve didn't know he needed. 

“I dunno, Rumlow, you want me back?” he says, and Rumlow smiles, wide and genuine, faces Steve when he grasps his shoulder this time.

The he looks to Rollins and, much to Steve's surprise, the corner of Rollins' mouth ticks up.

“Wouldn't be the worst thing,” he mutters, and Rumlow laughs.

“Yeah, wouldn't be the worst thing,” he says, looking back at Steve.

STRIKE aren't going to fill the hole in his heart, but Steve's okay carving out a new niche for them instead.

~

They go out for drinks to celebrate. Steve tells Rumlow he can't get drunk, and Rumlow tells him that, 

“First, that don't matter. Second, we can still try, right?”

And so they settle in at a bar that's fairly close – one where there's a lot of those neon lights hanging behind the bar, and there's lots of mirrors and the place is lit low and the TVs are showing a football game, and the whole bar is full of people who are just sitting around and having a good time – at tables and in booths and at the pool table or on the little dance floor.

Rumlow tells Steve about Rollins messing up a debrief once – as story that has everybody laughing and Rollins ducking his head.

“Yeah, yeah,” Rollins says, but he raises his beer in acknowledgement. 

Steve goes back to the bar with Rumlow to pick up the next round – he'll need more than one pair of hands and Steve's not even warm from the alcohol – and leans back against the bar while Rumlow orders.

“Same again, Cap?” he says, and Steve nods.

“Sure,” he says. “Why not?”

He looks at the rest of STRIKE at their tables, and it's nice that none of them are muttering amongst themselves and casting furtive glances his way. Nobody's rolling their eyes or excusing themselves early. Everybody's having a good time – one or two of them are taking photos together on their smartphones, a couple have got up to dance and-

 _Bucky_.

It strikes him so instantly and with such certainty that he almost says Bucky's name, before he remembers firstly that he's on the other side of the country and secondly that he's seventy years too late.

It shakes him enough that he can feel the unsteadiness in his hands, the weakness in his knees. Is it going to be like this always? Will he forever see Bucky Barnes on the edge of his vision? (And would it really be so bad if he did?)

“...before we move on it next week. I mean, I don't...Cap?”

It takes a couple of seconds for Rumlow's voice to register, and then Steve's looking at him, turning his head too fast and staring. Rumlow leans back a little.

“Y'okay, Cap?” he says, and Steve looks back out across the badly-lit dance floor.

“Yeah, I,” he says, and then he has to swallow hard. Thinking it is easier than saying it, apparently. “Thought I saw...” he says. “I mean, I didn't. Can't have but I...I thought I did.”

Rumlow's expression's turned serious, understanding.

“Sure,” he says. “I know how that is. Maybe not like you but I get it.”

Steve feels the heavy realization settle on his shoulders. Every time he catches the back of a brown head of hair, a glimpse of that broad pair of shoulders, he knows that's how grief is. But every time, he's waiting for a miracle he knows isn't coming, waiting for someone else to say, _who, you mean this guy?_ or _I saw him too,_ but that's not how it works. 

Steve knows it can't be him, knows it'll never be him again, but every time he makes the same mistake, his heart dares to hope, for just a moment. 

Damn thing ought to've learned by now.

“I'm,” he says, and then he steels himself and uses every ounce of strength to turn his back.

_it wasn't him._

He uses every ounce of resolve not to check.

_You know it wasn't him._

“Sorry,” he rasps, his throat tight.

“Now don't,” Rumlow tells him, voice low, “be stupid enough to think you gotta apologise for that, Cap. You need a minute?”

And Steve wants to take one – he does – but it already hurts, his throat's already tight, and the last thing he wants is to lose half an hour staring into the distance. He hates it when that happens – as though he hasn't lost enough time already.

“Nah,” he says. “I'd be better off back at the table.”

Rumlow nods, and the bartender starts to line up their drinks.

“All right, Cap,” he says. “I trust you.”

And Steve feels a small ball of warmth in his chest at that, because he's pretty sure he trusts Rumlow, too.

***

The record player's on because he likes to put it on sometimes. He tries not to do it too often, because he knows what that could do to him. He tries not to close his eyes because sometimes his mind shows him picture reels behind his eyelids of old dance halls and back alleys and metal fire escapes and dusty bedrooms and-

He's reading, because there's a lot of it to catch up on. Some of the books he has, he keeps on his tablet computer, because he can carry a whole library around in the palm of his hand now. He can talk to a little square of glass, ask it any question, and it'll give him an answer.

Where can I go to eat?

Will the weather be fine tomorrow?

He can talk to anyone, any time he wants, and he can do it by voice or by type. How about that? He's living in the future. From anywhere in the world, he can make it so his apartment will be warm when he gets back.

But sometimes it's nice to feel the weight of someone's work in his hands, to cradle thin pages and thick covers, a stiff spine in his palm. 

He has a lot of books. He remembers reading in their old place, when Bucky had moved out of his parents' place and they'd gotten a place together. He'd spend free time on the old, worn couch with Bucky's library books in his hands, though he never read as much as Bucky. Oftentimes Bucky would read to Steve, especially when Steve got sick. 

He'd stretch out on the cushions and read until his eyes got too tired, or until his limbs grew too heavy, Bucky making coffee. 

He turns a page as Bucky's footsteps move around the kitchen-

Steve turns around so fast in his chair that he almost falls out of it, wide eyed and on alert in an instant, staring at the kitchen. 

Lights off, nothing out of place. Nobody there.

He pauses for a moment or five, and then closes his eyes.

Either he was asleep without realizing, or his imagination's working overtime – probably the latter. 

He goes for a run.

***

Steve sleeps in sweats. He'd rather sleep naked, but he's no fool. He's Captain America, which means someone is always trying to find him and hurt him, and one day they might get as far as into-his-apartment, at which point he needs to be ready, not hopping about on one foot with his dick out, trying to get into a pair of shorts. Or worse, full on fighting naked. (He could, but he'd really rather not.)

But he's...sort of comfortable at night. Less comfortable in a double bed by himself – the thing is soft and he can't always relax into it for the strange feeling of drowning in it, but it's a personal preference, rather than a situational inadequacy. His body's used to springs that poke and rocks that jab, and finding sand or stones or leaves up his shirt for days to come.

This bed is difficult to get out of in the mornings, and difficult to breathe in at night, but Steve spent a long time putting up with an uncomfortable bed. In such a beautiful apartment, with such beautiful – and probably expensive – furnishings, he ought to be more grateful than to be complaining about a well-made bed with a high-end mattress and expensive sheets, especially given that they've all been supplied to him without cost.

Anything for a national icon, somebody said. Steve prefers it when he and STRIKE are drinking in a dingy bar. It's a lot more like what he's used to.

So when he settles down at night, it's in a big, empty bedroom with slatted light playing across the walls from the slatted blinds on the windows, and the gentle sound of Washington D.C.'s more sedate traffic intermittently whooshing by outside, he's accustomed enough to fall asleep relatively quickly

~

He has no idea what wakes him, only that he's suddenly conscious. There's no traffic directly outside but he can hear the relatively distant whisper of it further down toward the circle.

He frowns, feeling muzzy, lifts his head and looks around the room. It's the kind of city-dark that he's used to, instead of the pitch-black, starlight-only blanket of countryside-dark that he could never bring himself to trust completely.

Something feels wrong, out of place, as though he were coming home to a house that smelled different. There's something present that wasn't present when he went to sleep, but he's not sure what it is. It feels almost as though there's someone in the apartment, but there's no sound, no movement, to indicate anything like it. 

He sits up in bed, pulls back the covers and sets his feet on the carpet. The bedroom is the only carpeted room, and Steve's grateful for it most of the time, but especially now when he needs to be silent. 

He reaches down to put his shield on his arm and then creeps toward the bedroom door, about as stealthily as he can manage. He keeps to the walls, keeps his shield up and scans the apartment in front of him. He doesn't need the hall light on, but he's been keeping it on regardless – there's plenty of light outside, but he feels better with it on for now, sue him.

Which means he can see that there's nobody there. 

He does a quick sweep of his main room, checks the kitchen. From there, he checks the spare room and the bathroom, closets included, and finds there's nobody in the apartment. Windows are still locked, door is still locked, and none of his markers have been disturbed, either. Nobody's in, and nobody has been in and left.

And yet, knowing this, he still spins on his heel when someone walks behind him not twenty seconds later, heart pounding, blood warm with adrenaline.

But there's _still_ nobody there. 

“What the hell?” he whispers.

He creeps back to his room, in the direction of...he doesn't even know what to call it. The non-existent person who just walked into his bedroom but didn't? But it's so pervasive a feeling that Steve's considering going for the gun in his safe – he _knows_ there's nobody in the place, he's already cleared it.

And how is he going to ask anyone else about it without saying something stupid like 'have you ever felt a presence in your home'? He'd sound like a nut. There has to be something else to this. Although he remembers once, a very long time ago, being given valerian for insomnia, which had been hellish.

Instead of it helping, he'd woken up to find Bucky in the living room and still remembers with crystal clarity asking who the hell he was, believing without a shadow of a doubt that this was an imposter in Bucky's body. He hadn't let Bucky near him, had sworn blind that Bucky's soul was lost somewhere and that this person had stolen Bucky's body, and he wouldn't let Bucky stay. Bucky had gone out and come back hours later when Steve had been falling over himself to explain. Bucky'd just told him darkly that it was the doctor could stand to do some explaining, and then thrown the valerian in the trash.

But it feels like that now – a disconnect he can't put together, a truth he knows is a lie. 

They tried him with ESP when he was first given the serum, to no avail. And he and the boys trudged through enough labs and battlefields that Steve would know if he could pick up on that kind of thing, so it can't be that.

There's nobody in his apartment, and yet he'd _felt_ someone there. 

But every second that passes makes him feel more stupid, and he glances at the clock on the microwave. Almost three – Steve does another sweep of the apartment, and then another, but he knows by the time he's done with the first that he's alone.

He's managed to have some pretty vivid nightmares sometimes, maybe that was what this was. The remnants of a night terror that he hadn't been able to shake until he woke fully.

He scrubs his hand over his face and goes back into his bedroom, setting the shield by the nightstand again before he gets back into bed. 

His pillows are still in the right place, and his bedclothes are mainly all right. He sleeps facing the window because that's where the light comes from, so all he has to do is calm down enough to get back to sleep. He could stay awake, too – as far as he's aware, there's nothing but briefings scheduled for the next few days. He could take the training time with STRIKE and work through operational paperwork and planning. But Steve knows all too well about the best laid plans of mice and men, and grabbing the extra sleep now would make him a little better equipped should the day ahead prove more active than he'd anticipated.

He pulls the covers up, closes his eyes, and breathes in deep, lets it out slow. If he-

There's someone in the room with him, _right now,_ directly behind him and standing right by the bed and looking down at him and Steve can _feel_ them standing there. He doesn't know how he missed them, but he knows he did, knows all he has to do is roll over and-

_“S TEVE!”_

Steve sits up, half to get away from the voice yelling in his ear and half to confront...

The...

The sun is up. The ringing in his ears is the roar of his own blood as his heart beats hard and fast, the urgency in his limbs is the piercing intrusion of the alarm clock on the nightstand.

It's morning, it's daylight, and he's alone.

~

Clint asks him why he looks so rough, and Steve just tells him the truth – a bad dream he can't shake.

Clint looks sympathetic, asks if he wants to talk about it.

“Someone was inside my apartment,” he answers, “invisible.”

Clint visibly shudders.

“Nice,” he says sarcastically. “You okay?”

Steve rolls one shoulder in a shrug. He doesn't know when he started dreaming but, if that last part was anything to go by, he might not even have woken up at all.

“I guess,” he says. “You and Nat want to come over tonight?”

Clint acts like the two things are unrelated.

“I'll text her,” he says.

***

**2013, Washington D.C**

_”On this episode...of Ghost Seekers...Greg and Justin take the team to Brooklyn, New York, for a special July Fourth Edition with a very....patriotic...addition to the team.”_

The show cuts between fisheye views of streets and warehouses, there's a flash of fireworks that Steve does not jump at, and then the camera's scanning over-

“Hey, I know that street!” he says, and Nat smirks.

_“First, the team investigate the Brooklyn library Steve Rogers frequented-”_

“Nope,” Steve says, just as old newsreels play and the librarian Steve has actually met in the Brooklyn library speaks to camera, because he didn't have time for the library between working and being too sick to work.

Bucky was a different story – always had some kinda book in his hands, usually science fiction.

_“We know that he lived in Brooklyn before he became Captain America...”_

_“But can the team decipher the messages here?”_

There follows a disappointing montage for roughly ten seconds, of knocks and creaks that any old building in Brooklyn would make, and Steve just gives Nat a _look_.

“Steve, in twenty minutes, they're going to say they're speaking directly to you. It's not highbrow entertainment.”

 _“And then,”_ the narrator continues, _”NAPS heads to the apartment building where Captain America was raised.”_

_“This is going to be the last investigation before they pull the building down-”_

“What?” Steve says, and Natasha looks like she might be considering looking mildly surprised. “I was told it was a museum now!”

It hurts more than he thinks it should – especially considering the state it had been in when he'd lived there. He didn't have many happy memories, except...

“It is,” she says. “Some historical group got hold of it before they could knock it down.”

And suddenly all the warm fuzzy feelings he has for the draughty old place fade.

“Ugh,” he says. “Plus, that's not the one I grew up in – that's the one I shared with Bu- with Bucky.”

She doesn't say anything but he knows she's heard – he always stumbles over it, even when there's nobody here but him.

_“Oh my God, Scott! Scott, did you hear that?”_

_“I did! I heard that!”_

_“Scott, that was a_ voice!”

The theme music starts up and Steve heaves a sigh. 

“This is forty-three minutes?” he says.

“Settle in,” she answers, and he rolls his eyes again but smiles when she goes back to watching.

He's not fool enough to think that she hasn't seen him smiling anyway.

Admittedly, this is not the best episode of not-the-best show on not-the-best channel, but Steve enjoys sitting through trashy programs with Nat. It's something they've done together since he started watching television, something she got him to do to share time and space with her and Clint. He wonders sometimes if it's habit she formed with him instead of one she shared with him, but it doesn't matter. Once in a while, she texts to ask if he's busy (he never is) and whether he wants company (mostly yes), and then she shows up and puts on the TV, and messes around with the thing she set up that records her shows. Or, in this case, her reruns.

So they sit quietly, side by side, as the Ghost Seeker team splits into pairs to wander around Brooklyn library. He makes the occasional comment as the North American Paranormal Society move from room to room insisting that the heating system in the building is finishing the end of shave-and-a-haircut, and that the traffic outside is a 'menacing hum' that somehow indicates the displeasure of a lingering spirit that they can't confirm is Steve Rogers, but they're pretty sure though, but it's a tame episode as far as their episodes go.

There've been a couple of entertaining ones – there are a hell of a lot of abandoned asylums in the United States, and Steve remembers well the fear of being locked up in one. Too sick, too stubborn, it was one of the few things he was genuinely afraid of – but, aside from one or two old medical facilities and the odd surprise location, the majority of the time is spent walking around in the dark. Which means the majority of Steve and Nat's time is spent poking fun.

But watching the Ghost Seekers cast wander around Brooklyn Library (honestly, even if Steve had been dead, even if he'd been haunting the library, surely there are one hell of a lot more interesting people floating around that place than him) is not doing anything for him tonight. Maybe it'd be funny some other night, but he's had an off day and now he's just ready for the show to be done.

He wouldn't mind maybe a nice cup of coffee and a chat, he could order something nice in if Nat's hungry (and that took long enough to get used to – not only having enough to eat all the time but this culture of having food delivered directly to your door, having an entire night devoted to leftovers) and they can just spend an evening _not_ watching the Ghost Seekers pretend they had any idea what was going on with the spirit of Steve Rogers while they were filming.

Show him a video of any psychic over the last seventy years who's said “Steve Rogers is currently an ice cube,” and then Steve'll be interested.

Actually, maybe that's why this episode is so difficult. A group of guys wandering around places that mean nothing to them but something dear to Steve, claiming all sorts of things about him without ever actually knowing anything at all. It makes sense – those are the main reasons he hates Fox News. 

But he likes these guys and that's still not making it better.

“Gimme your bowl,” he says around the halfway mark, while an older lady in a nice pink jumper is showing Greg and Justin around Steve and Bucky's old apartment building. 

Natasha looks at him, and he knows that she sees he's bored. He also knows that she's a good enough friend by now that she won't push him to do something he doesn't want to do. That's never worked for anybody.

So she hands him the empty bowl and he goes to the kitchen to wash them, taking his time. He's reaching the end of his social ability for the day – she doesn't count; she's not the problem. But he's going to want quiet fairly soon. Knowing Nat, she'll let him shut everything off just _after_ he's had enough, but she'll take pity eventually.

Except that he realizes after about five minutes that he may have severely underestimated the Ghost Seekers' expertise – or, at the very least, accidental discovery.

As per the run-in, Scott and Trano are alone in the apartment building – actually in the old apartment said 'to be the residence of Cap himself' according to Greg, when Trano looks around in the eerie grey light of the infra red camera and says,

_“Is there anyone here with us?”_

Steve's current abode is open-plan, so he can hear from the kitchen even if he's not watching. (Although, he's a supersoldier. He could likely hear from the pavement even if he weren't watching.)

And there's a noise on the TV.

Steve hears it, and something stops him, wrist deep in suds at the kitchen sink, so that he turns his head to listen again.

 _“You hear that?”_ Scott says, and Trano nods.

 _”I heard it,_ ” he says. _”Is that you, Cap?”_

 _“Captain America,_ ” Scott tries again, and it's any second now. _“Are you here with us?”_

There's a long period of silence, and then Trano cocks his head. Nat turns around to look at him.

 _“Can you tell us your name?”_ he says, and a smile curves her lips. 

As far as Nat's concerned, this is the moment the Ghost Seekers pre-emptively prove they've got no idea what they're doing but, for Steve, it's much worse. Because, in the silence that follows, a 'voice' that's muffled and distant, says,

 _“Steve...”_ from what sounds like perhaps a building away.

 _“Oh my God, Scott!”_ Trano says immediately, _“Scott, did you hear that?”_

_“I did! I heard that!”_

_“Scott, that was a_ voice!”

But Nat's smile has faded the way Steve is vaguely aware that his own must have done. He feels cold, the hair standing on the back of his neck.

That's not his voice.

But he knows whose voice it is.

~

Natasha is very quiet. 

Steve is very quiet, too, hands wrapped tightly, the knuckles white, around a mug of tea that Natasha made for him. It has a lot of sugar, and it's very hot, but it's not doing a damned thing to help because he can't get his hands to stop shaking long enough to drink it.

“I know what it sounded like,” she says, after a long time, and Steve looks at her, doesn't even move his head, he just stares.

“Don't,” he says, and his voice sounds like he's swallowed sandpaper. “I know what you're doing, and I appreciate it, but don't tell me I wouldn't know his voice anywhere. Don't tell me he could call and I'd even have to check who it was, don't tell me I couldn't pick his voice out of a crowd, _don't tell me I don't know his voice._ ”

She stares right back at him.

“I'd know him anywhere,” he murmurs.

“I know,” she says. 

He's going through it in his head, and he knows he'd sound like a lunatic if he said it out loud. How would he even begin-

But he knows how. He's Captain America. If he went to the Ghost Seekers, called them, wrote them, anything, if he told them who he was and said _take me with you,_ he knows they'd take him up on it because _he's Captain America,_ but what then?

He'd be a laughing stock. He'd never be put on active duty again. 

Captain America goes ghost hunting and doesn't get what he wants – Steve would go mad. Or, Captain America goes ghost hunting and gets what he wants, and _Steve would go mad._

It's got to be him.

It can't be. Steve's Catholic, for one – he can hear his mother's voice telling him the dead don't linger, they just pass on, that's all there is to it. God takes them or he doesn't, it's simple as that. He doesn't _believe_ in ghosts.

Except he hadn't believed he could be transformed into a supersoldier. He hadn't believed he could be frozen for seventy years. He hadn't believed they wouldn't make it out of the war alive. It can't be Bucky because that would mean he's been here, for seventy years, aimless and unseen and unloved and alone and-

What if it is him? What if he's there right now in some echo of a world he used to know, people swanning in and out every day to look at the place in which he used to live, the place where his heart once beat, what if Bucky's there right now and every second Steve isn't there, Bucky _knows_?

Is he waiting for Steve? Should Steve go? What if he's holding on because he wants to? What if Steve being there changes them both, what if Bucky goes, what if Bucky _stays_ -

It has to be a trick, it _has_ to be. There has to be some kind of record somewhere of Bucky's voice, someone who patched together recordings, remodulated speech patterns to sound like him, does a good impression of him, but it's no use.

It's no use – he _knows Bucky's voice_. He'd know Bucky's voice if he lived to be a hundred, he knows Bucky's voice even if- even though he'll never hear it again. Even if.

It can't be him. But it must be him. 

“What do I do, Nat?” he finds himself asking, and she's looking at him with such an odd expression that he doesn't recognise it at first. 

When he does, it's worse - sadness.

“I don't know,” she says.

~

They play it back, and then play it back twice.

_...your name?”_

_“Steve...”_

Six times.

_...your name?”_

_“Steve...”_

On a loop.

_...your name?”_

_“Steve...”_

And Steve leans forward, cranes his neck and strains his ears but it doesn't change except that he feels more and more insane with each one.

Eventually, it doesn't even sound like words. Just the same three noises time after time after time.

“Stop,” he whispers, but she hears him and stops it.

It's one o'clock in the morning and he can't listen to it any more. 

“I don't know,” he says, more to himself than to her, turning his head away. “I don't know, I don't know.”

“You do know,” she says. “You believe in ghosts that wander 'round old apartment buildings?”

“Nat,” he says.

“Do you?” she asks. 

He looks at her, looks at the black screen of the television, imagines the feel of his mother's rosary beads between his fingers as he squeezes his eyes shut.

“No,” he says, and it's such a hollow sound even in his own ears.

She's sitting up straight, looking straight at him, and she doesn't shift her gaze when she points at the television.

“You believe men with video cameras and expensive television contracts can contact the other side with battery powered tape recorders, right when it's convenient to their ratings?”

He grits his teeth

“No.”

“You believe the man who loved you most in the world would mistake someone else for you just because they asked his name?”

Steve presses his lips together so that they don't tremble, clenches his fist so his hands don't shake. He shakes his head, because he can't trust himself to speak. 

She's right, he realizes. If he'd know Bucky anywhere, if he'd know Bucky's voice, then Bucky would know his. It's their old place, it sounds so like him. It must be him.

But it can't be.

“I'm,” he says, breathing in sharply to stop his stomach clenching, “not watching this show with you any more.”

“I already erased the HDR,” she says.

“I'm...” he says, and he flounders.

“I can stay,” she says. “I've got nowhere to be.”

Steve nods, running his hand over his eyes.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

So they watch the shopping channel on low, with the lights on. 

By the time he's too tired to stay awake, it's almost four, and he only knows he's asleep because he can feel Natasha pulling a blanket over him as he slips under where they're still sitting on the couch.

***

**2013, Myanmar**

Steve doesn't like this place at all. What looked like a warehouse from above is a multi-storey facility underneath, and the whole thing is full of dust, hazy in a way that means either time or damage have taken a toll.

They're wearing respirators, which Steve hates, but there's no two ways about it.

The tech team are busy dealing with the remaining information on half-destroyed systems back in the server room, and there are a couple of anomalies in the building scan, so Steve's taken a couple of guys down to do a sweep. They're not expecting anything, but they're all armed in case there is something – STRIKE with their UMPs with the flashlights on the rails, and Steve with a Glock and his shield. He prefers his 1911, but that's sitting in the Smithsonian's vaults while they finish construction of the new Captain America exhibit. 

He's hoping against hope that they won't ask him to open it. He's had advanced warning of what will be in it, but it won't make it any easier to see. He knows the press these days follow all sorts of people these days, even those who haven't done anything of note, and he doesn't need photographs in the paper of his expression when he sees the Bucky Barnes section for the first time.

But what all of it means is that the gun he knows is in an airtight container and wouldn't work even if he had it with him – seven decades of ice will do that to a semi-automatic weapon. Which, in turn, means he's trying to clear a massive underground facility under a warehouse the size of a small village, full of detritus from what looks like a mad scramble to get out, with a weapon he doesn't really like. 

He and Brock are moving slowly, together, not quite back-to-back but close enough, sweeping their lights around as they move to make sure they don't miss anything. Steve thinks he catches a pair of cats-eye reflections at his two o'clock but they're not there when he moves his torch back.

“Rumlow,” he says anyway, “I got a cat or something, my two o'clock.”

“Yeah,” Brock answers, his voice coming more through Steve's earpiece. “Don't see it but it wouldn't surprise me.”

Steve's respirator is cutting into his cheeks, and having the humidity of his own breaths over his nose and mouth are making his eyes feel even drier.

Also, Steve doesn't like feeling like he's suffocating, and respirators have done that to him ever since the ice.

He catches those eyes again, swings his lamp back straight away this time, but it's either a small animal or it's nothing.

They move slowly, one step at a time – they're blowing the place when they're done. Steve isn't sure what it is they've found but what he's seen is awful. Experimentation, weapons tech – they taking it back to SHIELD but still tracking the people responsible. Steve's no fool – it'll go into SHIELD's knowledge banks, their vaults, their records – but that's better than in the middle of Myanmar with whichever lunatic created them in the first place.

Or wherever else said creator might end up if they don't _find the guy_.

“Any heat signatures left on the map?” Steve says, and Nat's voice crackles through.

 _“Negative for a steady read,”_ she says. _“I get one coming in and out but it's registering in different locations. Could be nothing, could be a diversion, could be something we can't track. Eyes open, boys.”_

“Copy,” Steve says, and the dust is so thick that the beams of light from their flashlights are visible, swinging round in arcs as they sweep the place. 

He hears movement to his left and Rumlow's sweeping the darkness behind them, so Steve shines his flashlight over there and catches something human sized, moving fast.

“Niner,” he says, and Rumlow turns to look, too. 

Steve holds still for a good couple seconds but it's only as he's thinking it was maybe a trick of the light that he hears movement again, now at his twelve o'clock – or, straight down the corridor from where they're standing, dead ahead of where they were walking.

Rumlow swings around too, means he's heard it as well, and they're both in time to spot something, less than average height, definitely human shaped, moving in the shadows by the debris in the room at the end of the hall.

“Great,” Steve mutters. “Isn't this every horror movie ever?”

“Sure, Big Guy,” Rumlow says, “wanna split up?”

Steve huffs a laugh and they keep walking, step by step, slow. 

The noise happens again, in a room behind them, and then forward and to Steve's right, maybe his two o'clock, and they both turn each time, both catch a glimpse.

“What the hell is this thing?” Steve mutters. “We got teleportation yet?” 

“Nope,” Rumlow tells him. “Maybe this guy's the first?”

There's a clatter that's loud enough to make them both jump, and a rock the size of Steve's fist tumbles out into the middle of the corridor.

“Romanoff,” Steve says, swinging his gun around with the flashlight by proxy. 

He only gets static back.

“Well that's worse,” Rumlow says. 

“Alright,” Steve tells him. “Stay close.”

There's another noise of to their seven o'clock but, this time, when Steve swings around, Rumlow squints into his beam of light and throws up a hand to shield his eyes.

“Ow, Cap, what-”

“You didn't hear that?” he says, and Rumlow turns to look.

“No?” he says. 

Then there's a noise down the corridor again, and Steve spins.

“Cap-”

And what he sees stops him dead. 

In the middle of the circle of light cast by Steve's flashlight, in his same uniform, with the same set of his shoulders and the same fall of his hair, stock still and silent with his back to Steve, stands the unmistakable form of a man Steve could never misidentify.

James Buchanan Barnes.

“Do you see anything?” he says, finds his grip on the gun is so tight he has to be careful of warping the thing. “Brock, can you see anything?”

Rumlow's beam comes up, but Steve knows the answer before he hears it.

“No?” Rumlow says, and he sounds confused.

“You're not seeing anything?” Steve asks again, and Rumlow shakes his head, Steve can hear the sound of his skin against his collar.

“Cap, I got nothing.”

“Alright, listen,” Steve says, eyes on what he sees. “I think my respirator's compromised. I want you to take point, I'll follow your lead.”

“Sure, Cap,” Rumlow says, taking the couple of steps it takes to get past Steve. “You need medical?”

“Not yet,” Steve says. “But I can't trust my eyes.”

He doesn't tell Rumlow why.

There's another noise, rubble on rubble, back at their nine o'clock again, and Rumlow looks at it, no hesitation, but Steve can't look away from the figure at the end of the corridor.

This is the figure from his dreams, from his nightmares. This is so perfectly how Bucky used to stand that it _must_ be in Steve's head, because it can't be real. He adjusts his body, transfers his weight from foot to foot, cocks his head and that only adds to his certainty that it's not real – wherever he stands, however he moves, it's as though the figure is on a turntable.

He never sees more of its face, never sees more of its arms - every time Steve moves to see him, the figure turns away without moving.

There's another noise, and Rumlow turns. Another, and he moves again, but Bucky stands still and silent in the dust-filled air of the underground facility.

Steve blinks, and then the figure is holding out its left arm, and its left arm _isn't there_. Where Bucky's left arm ought to be, there's only half an arm, and whatever's making Steve see things, from wherever his mind's calling up this kind of-

And then the sound begins.

Low and smooth and hollow, rising in volume – it's a voice, almost human, and it doesn't take Steve long to figure out where it's coming from. The figure at the end of the corridor hasn't taken a breath, isn't moving, but it's Bucky's voice, like Bucky'd tried to say 'mmm,' but forgot to close his mouth all the way. It's like a moan or a keen and Steve can't stand it, can't stand the resonance of it under his skin, can't stand the ringing of it in his ears-

Rumlow's getting closer to him, checking each room, and the figure turns its head as he approaches, same direction as his arm, out to the left.

There's a scatter of noise to Steve's right and he glances, and when he looks back- 

_Bucky is right in front of him._

He can't help the noise he makes, half a cry as he staggers backward, flashlight beam swinging with the movement – Rumlow brings his around instantly, shines it right at Steve.

“What the fuck-”

“Christ, compromised, I'm compromised,” Steve gasps, leg giving way so he falls hard onto one knee, gets his gun and flashlight back up enough to look at the back of the figure of Bucky.

The figure's stump goes out again, out to his left, the head turns again, out to its left, and Steve can't breathe, his ears are ringing, his heart is racing and just as he thinks he might pass out, a voice so loud it feels like someone's driven a needle into his left eardrum aches yells, 

_“S TEVE!”_

And he's spinning to pull the trigger before he recognises what he's fired at, and it turns out it's a damn good job that he did – it's thrown off whoever just threw a knife at Steve, and it whistles into his side instead of embedding itself in Steve's stomach.

Rumlow fires, too a moment later – double-tap that throws the guy's head back and takes him down. Rumlow keeps his flashlight beam on him for five seconds, ten, and then lowers it.

“Shit,” he mutters, goes to check for a pulse, must not find one.

Steve's ears are ringing, his pulse pounding when Rumlow comes back and grabs him by the shoulder, shakes until Steve looks up at him.

Bucky's gone.

“You with me, Cap?” Rumlow says.

_”- you copy? Come in, I repeat, come in!”_

“We hear you, Romanoff,” Rumlow answers, and Steve's head is aching, spinning, his stomach feels like jello and his knees do too.

He's going to be sick.

“Target down, Cap's respirator's compromised and we got a knife wound – I need a medic.”

 _”Roger,”_ Nat answers.

“Christ,” Steve mutters.

“It's okay, Cap,” Rumlow says. “How you doing?”

Steve drops onto his other knee, then sideways to sit on the floor like a pre-schooler, presses one hand to his head and the other to his side. He can barely see, the headache is so bad.

“I need a minute,” he says. “I need a minute.”

“Sure, Cap,” Rumlow says, and he sounds far away. “Sure.”

***

**2013, Washington D.C.**

Steve's never been that big of a football fan. He always preferred baseball, but he's got nobody to support these days – the Dodgers betrayed their home ground and there's not a chance in hell he's cheering for the Yankees. 

Brock passes him another beer and Steve takes it with a nod of thanks, settles back into one of Brock's many la-Z-boy recliners with a wince. Brock and Jack are on the couch, and they're currently the only ones in Brock's living room. Everyone else is getting more to eat from the kitchen.

Brock has a batchelor pad, which means it's all minimal and sleek and it looks like a catalogue and there's only things in it that Brock likes. Games system, big TV, rugs that looks like they used to be animals and lamps that look like they shouldn't work, but they do. It's nice – personal in a weirdly impersonal way, like a hotel. Brock's place is a status symbol, and Steve's heard him say things like 'silk sheets' and 'brushed steel' and Steve likes his own place better – it's warmer toned for a start.

Still, it's nice to spend time with people again, and Brock invited everybody over – Steve had no reason to decline. He even helped move the couch. By which he means, he moved the couch while Brock made sure the feet didn't scrape the hardwood on the other end. Being a supersoldier has a lot of advantages.

Now though? Steve's not sure how he feels. It's not the Superbowl so nobody's interested in what's going on in half time, but Steve doesn't feel like getting up.

He hasn't had any more nightmares but he's not been sleeping well either. And his side hurts too.

“I don't like him for this season,” Brock says. “Should have benched him. Hey, Big Guy, you with us?”

Steve feels slow, heavy. If he didn't know better, he'd think he was drunk, but he knows it's just been a hell of a long week. Or, you know what, maybe he _is_ drunk, 'cause he lost a hell of a lot of blood in Myanmar.

“What?” Steve says, and why in hell did he say something like that? “Wait. Yeah.”

Shit, he really is woozy, what the hell? _Tranquilizers_ don't work on him, so why the hell should beer? Beer's not even strong!

Steve squints at Brock and Jack – everything's a little bright, a little loud. It feels like being sick, but he can't get sick, can he?

“Justa sec,” he says, “'m gonna just...”

He sets his beer down on the little table next to the armchair, and he misses. The bottle tips, the beer goes everywhere.

“No,” Steve says.

Brock starts to get up just as Steve tries, but he gets his hands in beer because the chair squeaks when he plants his hands on it, and he kind of slips and falls back down, which hurts. 

“Hey, somebody pass me the paper towels,” Brock says, and Steve's going to wipe his hands on his pants to try and get up again but they're a funny color. 

They're not beer color.

“Oh, shit – Rumlow!” Jack says, and Steve looks at him, looks back at his hands just as Jack's running over to him. 

It hurts when Jack comes and grabs at Steve's side, and then Rumlow says something like,

“Fuck , man, call it in,” 

and then Jack's hands are a funny color too where they press against Steve's sticky side.

“Oh,” Steve says.

Maybe lifting the couch wasn't such a good idea.

~

_“Are you outta your goddamn mind,” he said, but Steve couldn't answer him._

_He tried but it was no use. The voice didn't stay._

_He was there, and then he wasn't._

~

“Bucky?” he says, and the tall, dark figure in front of him comes into focus as he word rasps past his lips.

“Hey, Big Guy,” Brock says, and his voice is low and soft. 

There's flowers on the table, a card. Natasha's hanging around the end of Steve's bed looking pissed.

“Gave us quite a scare,” Brock says, and Steve takes a second to remember. 

When he does, he wishes he hadn't.

“Your chair,” Steve says, and Brock waves a hand.

“Black leather, Cap,” he says, like an inside joke, “wipe-clean.”

Steve's not convinced, but he's too tired to argue, and getting more tired with each passing moment. If Buck says it's okay then it must be. Steve has actually seen him yell at someone for not using a coaster so he'd be looking a lot more strained if he were lying.

“I'm just glad you're okay,” Buck tells him, sets a warm hand on Steve's shoulder and smiles.

“Thanks, Buck,” he says around a yawn, slipping back under already.

Nat looks upset or something, but Steve's asleep before he can figure out why.

~

He's not allowed back on active duty for a week, and Nat brings Indian to his apartment one evening. Kate's just coming home next door when he answers the door to her.

“Hey,” he says to Nat, and then, “hi, Kate.”

Kate gives him a wan kind of smile and then looks a little warily at Natasha, who...seems to have taken an instant dislike to Kate for some reason. Steve doesn't get how it works, but that's nothing new so it doesn't bother him. 

Steve just stands aside to let Nat in, and shrugs apologetically at Kate.

She holds up a hand - _don't worry about it_ \- and he smiles, tilts his head in the direction of his apartment - _gotta go_ \- and then she's smiling too.

When he gets inside, Nat's leaning against the counter and not trying to hide the fact that something's up.

“What?” he says. “Not that it's not good to see you.”

She's not here to lecture him. A couple of other people have, people who don't know him so well. What were you thinking moving a couch, why didn't you say something, you could have died, etc. But she won't. So that's not the problem.

“Are you feeling okay?” she says, in that fantastic combination of nonchalant but deadly serious.

Steve frowns.

“Because I moved a couch and pulled some stitches?” he says.

“No,” she says, “I mean are you still having nightmares?” 

It's an odd question for her to ask, and his frown deepens.

“Nightmares?” he says. “I mean, I get 'em from time to time, why?”

She shrugs, shakes her head a little, looks away.

“I don't know,” she says. “I thought I'd ask.”

Steve shakes his head too, going to pull some plates down from the cupboard.

“Haven't had one for a little bit,” he says, “but thanks for asking.”

“You know, we didn't find anything in the atmo-analysis,” she says. “Whatever compromised your respirator must've either dissipated or be undetectable. Otherwise, what would it have been?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Must be.”

And, when he turns back, her expression is neutral again, accepting. He still gets the feeling she doesn't believe him, but she brought Indian, so he'll forgive her.

***

**2014, Washinton D.C.**

Steve never made the opening of the Captain America exhibition at the Smithsonian.

He'd actually shown up, before the “Code 95 ASAP” text from Nat came through and he had to excuse himself. Of course, when he charged into his apartment to get into his suit and grab the shield on his way to extraction, Nat was sitting there in a sundress and a smirk with Clint eating a pizza next to her, both of them on his couch. 

“Code nintey-five is _you,_ old man,” she'd said. 

And they both agreed Steve could go back if he really wanted, but Steve decided he was better off with pizza.

Steve goes to the museum sometimes, checks in on the exhibit during quiet hours, if there's been anything new. And because that's where everyone he loved is most alive to him. There are photographs of Peggy, photographs of Bucky, of the boys, but there's a huge mural inside the exhibit, with the uniforms they used to wear set out in front, in full color. There's footage of Peggy when she still looked the way Steve remembers her, footage of Bucky smiling. 

Sometimes he goes where his friends still live on big screens and little screens the same way they live in his mind. 

He knows it's probably not good for his health – that's what he's told – but how would they know? There's never been anyone like him before. He doesn't make it anyone else's problem, he doesn't do it all the time.

It's just that, sometimes, it's good to see them.

Twice a week, he visits Peggy, and sometimes he ducks into Arlington and goes to talk to the people he's moving forward without. It's not as hard as it used to be, and Bucky's grave is empty anyhow. It's just as well - he would have wanted to be buried in Brooklyn if they'd ever found him.

Peggy will be taken home – she's told him so. She wants to be buried on 'good old British soil.' 

It's hard to hear. But he smiles anyway.

It won't be long.

He's been to Arlington one day, when he's got a day or two off. He'll be seeing Peggy, maybe make another trip to the museum because it's been a couple of months since he did, but it must be Arlington that does it.

His boys are buried together, those who wanted to be. Falsworth and Jaques went home, and so their names are carved on the stone that stands as Steve and Bucky's memorial. It's not flashy – nobody put up a statue, thank God – it's just their names together, their dates together. They asked Steve if he wanted it removed, altered, but Steve said of it that he'd need it one day anyway, and it was a fitting tribute to their memories.

It rains, because of course it does. Pathetic fallacy is just the sort of joke the universe thinks is funny, and he stands by the three headstones – Jim, Gabe, Tim – and tries not to think about where he really belongs if his and Bucky's names are written in stone together in a cemetery. 

He's cold and wet by the time he gets home – a disadvantage of standing in the rain and losing track of time, and then riding a motorcycle home.

He eats, because it's the evening, takes a shower because it was wet and cold, and goes to bed, because it's been that kind of day.

~

When he wakes up, it's because there's someone in his room.

He opens his eyes, and there's someone standing at the foot of his bed, and he wishes he didn't know who it was, wishes he hadn't seen it before, but he knows. 

It's Bucky, it couldn't not-be Bucky, and he knows he must be dreaming because this kind of thing, figures that look like this, they don't happen. He's always seen the back of Bucky out of the corner of his eye, like his mind can't remember what he looks like (it can) or like Steve can't stand to look into Bucky's eyes knowing he's the reason Bucky's dead.

But this is much worse. It's the middle of the night and Bucky's facing away from him, right at the foot of Steve's bed. Bucky isn't breathing and there's no sound at all – no traffic, no aircon, no people outside, nothing - all Steve has is the darkness and the figure of Bucky and the roar of his blood in his ears – but the worst of it is that he's certain he's awake. 

It could be night terrors – Natasha told him about them, and sleep paralysis too – but he can't take his eyes off the figure at the end of his bed.

There's a noise, that keening, wailing noise, and it pierces Steve's skull like a knife, but he stares at the back of the figure of Bucky Barnes, that phantom that won't leave him be – maybe this is his punishment, to be haunted by the brother he killed, by the man he loves, but never seeing his face for the rest of his life.

Steve can't stand being in the dark with it – what if this is someone who means him harm in the guise of someone they know he'd never hurt?

He doesn't take his eyes off it, doesn't look away, moves as slowly as he can and, with his right hand, he turns on the nightstand lamp.

It's gone. 

The noise is gone, too.

Steve blinks in the light, eyes moving in case it's moving, but he doesn't see it and turns his head to-

He freezes. 

His heart is in his throat, his ears ring. 

Just like the last time, there's someone in the room with him, _right now,_ directly behind him and standing right by the bed and looking down at him and Steve can _feel_ them standing there. 

He can't go on this way, can't live like this – he knows what you do with nightmares because it's the same thing you do with everything else. 

Once you start running, they'll never let you stop.

He swallows hard, takers a breath, and looks up at it.

He feels his blood turn to ice, feels terror snap down his spine, it's Bucky, Bucky's right by the bed, Bucky's looking down at him, Bucky's face is less than a foot from his but it's _wrong_ , like someone's pulled at his mouth and eyes so they're gaping black holes, like someone's smudged his face so it's wrong on his skull and Steve yells, pushes himself backwards so hard he falls out of bed-

Bucky's there, right beside him, towering over him where he lies on the floor, he scrabbles backwards-

Bucky's there behind him, standing in the corner of the room, Steve gets onto his hands and knees, onto his feet, he runs and Bucky's by the doorway, Bucky's in the lounge, in the kitchen, at the window, everywhere he looks Bucky's ahead of him until he's at the door and then there's that noise, that awful, terrifying keening noise and Steve can't get the door open, can't make the lock unstick and he knows, he knows when he looks back what he'll see.

Bucky's coming down the corridor, one hand and one stump outstretched and reaching, his mouth-shape open and emitting that awful keening wail and his feet don't move but his body keeps moving and Steve shuts his eyes – if this is how he dies, Bucky's come for him the way he deserves-

And then there's silence.

Steve's gasping, there's sweat running into his eyes and his heart is hammering but there's silence aside from the whoosh of traffic and the hum of the aircon.

He opens his eyes.

The place is empty but every hair on Steve's body is standing on end.

Okay, no, he's not doing this – he's going for a run.

~

It's a lot easier to figure out what happened in the light of pre-day. He's only been jogging for a couple of minutes when he starts to really think about it and, to be honest, there has to be a rational explanation for this because there's always a rational explanation for things like this. 

Steve had been to Arlington and it had been raining and, while Steve's metabolism is fast, while he'll always heal, things do affect him – not for as long or as badly as others, but they do all the same. So it stands to reason that if he was sad and guilty about Arlington, and if he'd spent the afternoon in the rain and then gotten cold on the way home, maybe he was running a bit of a fever. 

And if he was running a fever and being sad about Arlington, there's every possibility that he didn't know he was either hallucinating or dreaming. And it's not, he reminds himself, as though he hasn't hallucinated Bucky before – last year in Myanmar. Steve's still halfway to calling it Burma every time.

He resigns himself to the fact that he's had an odd night, but one that can be explained, and lets the rhythm of his feet against the tarmac soothe his mind and focus his thoughts. All he has to do is keep going.

He's almost at the tidal basin bridge on Ohio Drive when he sees the guy.

He's seen the guy before – sweater says Air Force. Sweater says _pararescue,_ actually, and any man who's a PJ is all right by Steve – he knows what it takes to be one. And, as much as he's honored to be sharing a jogging route with one, he's seen him a couple times before and now his curiosity's piqued enough that he decides on his course of action.

And, because Steve Rogers is determined that his morning will be better than his night, and has decided to take Nat up on her lighten-up-a-little advice, (and because he's a giant child,) he does it by annoying the guy into talking to him.

“I kinda put that together,” the guy says, when Steve eventually introduces himself.

And, for a minute, Steve thinks the guy is going to wind up like every other guy who's met him, and ask him stupid questions. Sometimes being asked outright is nice, but it's still a little jarring to be reminded that everybody knows what happened to Captain America.

But then Sam Wilson starts to talk to him like a soldier – like an airman – instead of like a fan or a member of the press, and Steve finds himself answering honestly, because few people have ever asked the right questions before.

Wilson invites him to the VA before Steve has to leave on a mission, and Steve thinks about it for the rest of car journey before his mind has to be on the mission.

~

“Ultimate fighting?” Sam Wilson says in a long, mostly-empty corridor, tempering Steve's pain and uncertainty with good-natured humor.

Steve gets the feeling that Sam is like Nat and Clint. He's the kind of guy who'll show up with beer and a pizza instead of making up nicknames or roping Steve into every football-game party for the next six months. Not that Steve doesn't appreciate it, but people are a lot noisier than Steve ever really had the chance to be when he was younger. People were loud back then, it's just that he was too sick to be loud, too.

But Steve is still hurting.

So for Sam to treat him like Steve Rogers instead of like Captain America is not only fairly unusual – it's absolutely welcome.

Sam's the kind of guy Steve knows he can rely on.

~

He gets it confirmed less than a week later.

“Everyone we know is trying to kill us,” Nat says.

“Not everyone,” Sam answers.

~

But it's when they're standing in the middle of the street in downtown D.C., amongst overturned, bullet-ridden vehicles and twisted metal warped by fire and collision that Steve's entire world comes to a screeching halt.

The Ghost.

The man with the metal arm.

The man he's been fighting, the incredible counterpart to his own strengths, the pinpoint-accurate marksman who's been cutting them off and keeping them low, and the most terrifyingly proficient hand-to-hand combatant Steve has ever fought, the Winter Soldier is...

“Bucky?” Steve murmurs.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” Bucky says and then Sam is on him, and Steve is halfway between helping and stopping when Bucky comes up again, gun drawn.

Steve doesn't even consider that he might not die. Nothing exists but for the two of them, and he'd be dead a moment later were it not for the sudden, painfully loud voice in Steve's right ear, 

_“S TEVE!”_

And he ducks just in time for a rocket to scream over his head.

Bucky is gone, hopefully not obliterated, but Steve can't move.

Was that Bucky? Could that really have been Bucky, or is Steve so desperate that he sees him everywhere now? Is Bucky so prevalent in his mind that his face is everyone Steve doesn't know? And if it was Bucky, if that was Bucky....

There's no way it couldn't have been, not this close, not looking at the lines on his face or the color of his eyes or the set of his mouth – that was Bucky.

But their next problem is worse.

***

The voice that calls Steve's name in his dreams and his nightmares, in his hallucinations and his daydreams, Bucky's voice, comes back to him.

At the bunker, in his memories, he thinks of Bucky when they were younger, and hears the voice in answer. 

_”I knew him,”_ it whispers, and then Bucky's voice is screaming in pain like an echo in Steve's skull.

~

At SHIELD, when they're fighting, he hears the voice in desperation.

 _”Please,”_ it whispers, _please, please-_

~

And on the helicarrier, as punch after punch fractures Steve's jaw, breaks his cheekbone, crushes his eyesocket, the voice – Bucky's voice – is screaming his name even as it tells him he's his mission, crying out for Steve even as the Winter Soldier- even as Bucky is- Even though Steve is dying, his name is James Buchanan Barnes, he's known Steve his whole life-

_”You're my mission-”_

And then-

Steve falls...

And when Steve can't see any longer, when he drops, weightless, from the burning wreckage of Hydra's greatest weapons into cold, cloudy water, cathedrals of smoke above him, an abyss, his eternity below, Bucky comes for him.

_ ”You're my friend.” _

Steve knew he would and, for the second time in his life, he's not afraid.

He's not alone.

He knows whose hand reaches for him in the void, whose body guards him, stretches out for him, illuminated by the fingers of sunlight that delve into the flood. 

He knows who's come to take him home.

”STEVE!”

***

For the second time, Steve only knows how wrong he was when he wakes.

And this time, he's not alone.

“On your left,” he rasps. 

Sam only smiles. Steve goes back under because he can rest. He can sleep.

Bucky's alive.


	3. Epilogue

**2015, Avengers Compound, New York**

The television is on in the corner but the volume is down, and Steve is looking over some paperwork at his desk when he feels the presence in the room change. A shift of atmosphere, a flicker of perception, and he smiles.

_“I wasn't sure you'd come,”_ he sends.

_“I'm gett ing better,”_ Bucky answers. _”I can hold the conn ection for longer._

Steve turns to look at him.

His edges blur, but his face is there – unshaven jaw, his hair long enough to brush his shoulders. He looks anxious, but there's color in his skin and a breadth to his shoulders Steve appreciates.

_“You look good,”_ he tells him. _”I'm happy to see you.”_

Bucky's image shifts a little. 

He's learned to control it now, to manifest the way he wants to – in the right place, to the right person, looking the way he ought to look. He doesn't cast himself about like he used to, doesn't find himself in odd places or someone else's dreams, doesn't slip into the wrong existence by accident.

They've been on the same wavelength since 1943 – being the only two people in the world with a finished serum will do that – but how was Bucky to communicate before he fell, when they were surrounded by death and fighting and fear and darkness? How after, with his mind frozen and fried alternately? Steve only did it once, himself, by accident, before he'd even rescued Bucky at all.

He can't remember all the many times Bucky's damaged brain tried to reach his own, all the times Bucky tried desperately to reach him across the abyss and couldn't get it quite right. He's just amazed Bucky's healed enough to come through properly now.

_”I wish you'd tell me where you are,”_ Steve sends, and walls flicker around Bucky, pink and dirty green.

_”I'm safe,”_ he answers. _“Knowing would put you at risk._

_Don't you think I can make my own decisions?_ Steve asks. 

_Does the girl know what she's looking for?_ Bucky asks instead. _“I felt her search ing. She reached out from close to you._

_”She's learning,”_ Steve answers. _“She can't control her abilities yet, she doesn't know to look for you. Do you want me to discourage her?”_

_“The astral plane's a big place,”_ Bucky says, and his image shakes its head, _“and if she's the only one who can follow us here, we don't need to worry.”_

Steve looks back at his body. It looks like it's paying attention to the television.

_“I miss you,”_ Steve says. 

_“I'm not ready for what that means, yet,”_ Bucky says, the words grown soft and careful. _“I might not be ready for a long time.” _

_“That's just fine,”_ Steve tells him. _“All you have to do is stay alive and stay safe.”_

Bucky nods, and the connection begins to fade.

Steve knows Bucky can still feel him when he sends,

_ “I'll wait.” _

Bucky's answer makes it through on a burst of gratitude.  
  


_ “I know.” _   
  
  
  
  


  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there you go. Bucky accidentally projects himself onto the astral plane a bunch 2k17. Hope you guys enjoyed - come hit me up on tumblr, my username's the same.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [What the Ghost Wants (FanArt)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14986202) by [AyaroS92](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AyaroS92/pseuds/AyaroS92)




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